Veteran music writer Blair has fashioned a moving and insightful biography of Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia by focusing on the most important and enduring part of his legacy: his music. For three decades the Dead remained one of the most interesting and daring music ensembles around. Garcia himself over that time sustained a level of artistry and innovation as a musician and composer rare in 20th-century music history. Skillfully weaving these themes within the personal events of Garcia’s life, including his 14 years as a junkie, and the social history that Garcia both witnessed and helped bring to life—from the halcyon days of Haight-Ashbury to the phenomenon of the Deadheads of the 1980s—Jackson produces perhaps as clear an understanding of the man as we are likely to get. Originally a bluegrass banjo player, Garcia brought to the Dead the conversational nature of bluegrass, the need within that music for the instruments to talk to one another. Going electric and joining with sympathetic players allowed for Garcia an infinite expansion of that original “conversational” insight. Playing at LSD-inspired gatherings in San Francisco, and taking plenty of LSD themselves further extended the Dead’s proclivity for improvisation (and Garcia’s proclivity for drug taking) and allowed them to learn how to do it well. Particularly interesting here is the story of Garcia’s relationship with lyricist Robert Hunter (he of the often cryptic lyrics on foreboding and death), of how that relationship developed over a generation, how Hunter could say what Garcia felt. Theirs was a much underappreciated musical collaboration. There are also side trips to Garcia’s many musical explorations outside of the Dead, from country to jazz to R&B. Garcia emerges in the end as a flawed genius, whose personal demons, especially drugs, inspired his music, eventually weakened it, and finally silenced it. Yet the book is an unapologetic celebration of Garcia’s life rather than a lament on his death. Fine reading on a most curious American life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88660-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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