For unreconstructed rockers who long for pre–Eminem/Britney days.
Solid collection of rock writing from the mid-1960s through the ’90s, mostly by veteran scribes for magazines like Creem and New Musical Express.
Selected from the archives of www.rocksbackpages.com, a Web site Hoskyns (Across the Great Divide, not reviewed) started to keep critically insightful rock writing accessible at a time when corporations “control and commodify rock rebellion,” these 30 contributions from mostly well-known figures like Greil Marcus, Paul Williams, Simon Frith, and Nick Hornby arguably provide a representative cross-section of the genre’s strengths. Some essays are built around interviews with significant figures like Neil Young, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Ice Cube, and Bruce Springsteen (Jerry Gilbert’s astute 1974 piece captures the Boss forlornly straddling impoverishment and fame). The strongest work provides offbeat perspectives on various scenes, capturing vital moments in the sprawling narrative of rock’s development. These include Mick Farren’s humorous “Live From Nashville” (1976), which captures an uneasy “outlaw” South; Barry Miles’s poignant reminder of pre-AIDS downtown decadence, epitomized by the glammed-out New York Dolls; and Lenny Kaye’s hilarious account of Grand Funk Railroad’s sold-out Shea Stadium gig. Other notable entries include Steve Turner’s prescient look at the image-marketing behind David Bowie’s early rise, David Dalton’s chillingly precise eyewitness account of the fatal 1969 concert at Altamont, and Greg Shaw’s endearingly fuzzy attempt to lionize the Mods upon The Who’s release of Quadrophenia. Lesser contributions merely reflect cults of personality, as in a pallid Madonna interview by Glenn O’Brien (editor of her Sex book), Will Self’s unremarkable Morrissey portrait, and Charles Murray’s perfunctory account of Eric Clapton’s 1973 return to performance. Attention is predictably lavished on boomer rock of the ’60s and ’70s at the expense of the ’80s and ’90s; coverage of Nirvana and Lollapalooza notwithstanding, there is almost no acknowledgement of the post-Reagan rock underground. (See Michael Azzerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, 2001, for that tale.)
For unreconstructed rockers who long for pre–Eminem/Britney days.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2003
ISBN: 1-58234-282-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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