A vivid and surprisingly involving work about accordions and the stories they inspire.
A coffee-table book pays tribute to the accordion and the people who have been enchanted by its “calming and happy voice.”
This beautifully designed work by Ramunni (Left Turn, Right Turn, U-Turn, 2011) chronicles his efforts—in conjunction with the New England Accordion Connection & Museum in Canaan, Connecticut—to amass a large collection of accordions. An unexpected but moving byproduct of this project is a large assemblage of stories about the people who sold or donated those instruments to the museum. The author is a life-long accordion aficionado himself, here remembering the teasing he got for playing “the squeezebox” while growing up on Long Island in the 1950s and ’60s. The museum offers visitors a chance to play accordions. In the course of those encounters, Ramunni has often seen people awash in sentimental memories of embracing the instruments when they were younger: “It is often like seeing two people, who were the best of friends in their childhood, suddenly meet again by chance after being apart for many years. It can be an emotional time.” Those heightened feelings of recognition and nostalgia run through many of the tales the author relates. A woman named Carol tells him about her Uncle Vinnie, who only knew how to perform three songs on the accordion he was eventually buried with. There’s a story of a man who taught himself to play the instrument while sitting in a coal shed; a heartwarming reminiscence revolves around a survivor of Russia’s Communist regime who was left virtually nothing by the state except his accordion. Readers also learn about a valuable accordion presented to Pope Pius XII in 1943. The author clearly doesn’t intend his book to be a history of the accordion. He makes passing reference to its surprising antiquity, dating back to ancient China, but his focus is on far more recent and mostly American conceptions of the instrument. In addition, he doesn’t see this slim volume as any kind of study of accordion music or the mechanics of the instrument. This is an entirely inviting, beginner-friendly work, one that seeks to spread the word rather than instruct specialists. “Just as we have a heart beat as generated by our hearts,” Ramunni writes, “the accordion has a tempo that we give it every time we play a song.” The gallery of short, richly impressionistic stories the author has heard in his quest to add accordions to his enormous collection serves to stress the strong communal aspect of both the music and the instruments. The sheer love and passion involved are easily visible in the lavish book’s dozens of color images by debut photographer Homolka of gorgeous accordions, some of them as intricately exquisite as any prized violin or piano. And that enthusiasm is mirrored in the vibrant vignettes the owners shared with Ramunni—tales of family, wine, celebration, and love.
A vivid and surprisingly involving work about accordions and the stories they inspire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9761766-1-9
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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