An essential piece of Southern musical history.
Exploration of the racial politics that defined the country and soul music scenes during the 1960s and ’70s.
Perhaps nothing better represented the racial divide in American culture in the wake of desegregation than country and soul music. The racial tension embodied by these dueling cultures was perpetuated by the “musical color line” separating black soul and white country. The crux of Hughes’ (History/Oklahoma State Univ.) analysis is the “country-soul triangle” represented by music communities in Memphis and Nashville, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and epitomized by the Stax label and FAME and American Studios. The musicians who traversed this triangle, both white and black, recorded for artists as disparate as Aretha Franklin and Hank Williams Jr. However, Hughes deftly notes the contradiction represented by country and soul studios as racially integrated workplaces whose music would only reinforce racial divides, despite the musicians themselves championing their music as symbols of interracialism and christening it the “Memphis sound” to reflect their progressive relationship. However, the idealism of this arrangement was not so perfectly enacted. Hughes corrects the misrepresentation of this narrative, which heralds white musicians as stewards of racial progress in the South but often downplays or outright avoids the contributions of black artists, such as Arthur Alexander. Moreover, black musicians saw their white counterparts not as “freedom fighters” but potential collaborators and competitors whose whiteness threatened their livelihood. Rich with anecdotes of major artists like the Osmonds, Willie Nelson and Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, Hughes dissects the racial interplay that defined the triangle against the conservative “New Right,” whose reactionary politics were embodied by traditional country music. As the scenes continued to meld and the musical divide between country and soul became less noticeable and more commercialized, it was clear that white musicians benefited far greater than their black counterparts, while racial disparity continues to linger today in songs like the bungled collaboration “Accidental Racist” by LL Cool J and Brad Paisley.
An essential piece of Southern musical history.Pub Date: March 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2243-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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