Humans damaged Roger, but it is Siebert’s very humanity—open-minded and compassionate—that offers healing. A winner.
In a refuge “built to house and heal bad dreams,” New York Times Magazine contributor Siebert (A Man After His Own Heart, 2004, etc.) communes with a chimp retired from the entertainment business.
Roger is a 28-year-old former Ringling Brothers performer—one of the lucky ones who now lives at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., where traumatized primates seek succor from their emotional travails. When Siebert and Roger locked eyes, he writes, something deep and abiding clicked. Here was a long-lost friend, a cross-species confidant, an escort for a glimpse “into our human essence through the eyes of the sentient non-us.” Human culpability for the mistreatment of chimps—and elephants, dolphins, whales…the list is endless—is not up for debate, nor is the chimp’s capacity to suffer the effects of trauma: erratic behavior, violent anger, etc. Siebert cogently examines the physiology of psychology, and he offers plenty of well-told evidence of chimp, whale and elephant populations displaying behavior consistent with human traumatic brain injuries. Throughout, Siebert strives to connect the dots between the human sense of expulsion from its animal state and the longing for restoration it creates, and between redemption for us and psychic release for Roger: “Do we each have in this world an extant version of our former simian selves? A primatological doppelganger and preassigned escort back into our own animality? I can’t say for certain. All I know is that I’d never have posited such a thing until I met Roger.”
Humans damaged Roger, but it is Siebert’s very humanity—open-minded and compassionate—that offers healing. A winner.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9586-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
Gioia, musician and critic, winner of the ASCAPDeems Taylor Award for The Imperfect Art (not reviewed) takes on a daunting task, tracing the history of jazz from preCivil War New Orleans to the embattled music of today—and does a creditable job of it. Jazz's history has been written by entirely too many mythographers and polemicists. Gioia, mercifully, spares us the myths and polemics. ``The Africanization of American music,'' as he calls it, begins farther back in American history than New Orleans's aptly named Storyville red-light district around the turn of the century; he starts his narrative in the slave market of the city's Congo Square in 1819, and when it comes to Storyville, he offers hard facts to puncture the picturesque racism that finds jazz's roots in the whorehouses of New Orleans. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Gioia's account is the sociohistorical insights it offers, albeit occasionally as throwaway sidelights, such as his observation about drumming as an avatar of regimentation more than of freedom. He is particularly good in explaining how the music was disseminated and shaped by new technologies—the player piano, the phonograph, radio. He is also excellent at drawing a portrait of a musician's style in short brushstrokes. His prose is for the most part fluid and even graceful (although his metaphors do get a bit strained at times, as in his comparison of Don Redman's ``jagged, pointillistic'' arrangement of ``The Whiteman Stomp'' and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Although Gioia is much too generous to jazz-rock fusion of the '70s and '80s and probably gives more space than necessary to white dance bands like the Casa Loma orchestra, if you wanted to introduce someone to jazz with a single book, this would be a good choice. (9 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-509081-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.
A cornucopia of shrewd cultural observations from New York Times columnist West (Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, 2016).
In 18 pointed essays, the author addresses a variety of topics, including frivolous internet sensation Grumpy Cat, South Park, Guy Fieri, and the global significance of abortion rights and gender equality. In West’s opening tirade, she denounces Donald Trump’s repetitive usage of the term “witch hunt” while scrutinizing his uncanny “ability to conjure reality out of hot air and spittle.” This essay serves as the launching pad for further pieces exposing the sorry state of contemporary American politics and popular culture. Tough, irritated, and eager to speak her truth, the author expounds on the unifying aspects of visibility and activism to cultivate change, especially when countering the denigration of women. Her sharp wit and no-nonsense sense of humor also shine through her dissection of the work of Adam Sandler, Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet plan (her avocado smoothie “could give diarrhea an existential crisis”), and how movies like Clue shaped her perspectives and appreciation for one-liners and physical comedy. West rarely minces words, especially regarding documentaries on the Ted Bundy murders and the Fyre Festival or when expressing her sheer appreciation for the legacy of Joan Rivers, and her writing is fluid and multifaceted. Though she often rages at social injustice, she also becomes solemnly poetic when discussing her fondness for the drizzly Pacific Northwest, where she was raised and still resides, a place where she can still feel her deceased father’s presence “in the ridges and grooves of my city—we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion I can relate to.” Only occasionally are the smoothly written essays hijacked by intrusive asides—e.g., her experience inside a proselytizing Uber driver’s car, a scene wedged into her reflections on climate change. Though uneven at times, the author drives home the critical issues of our time while taking time to tickle our funny bones.
Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44988-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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