A must not just for rock fans, but for anyone interested in the intersection of music and culture.
A journalist asks: What happened to indie rock?
There was a time, about 20 years ago, when “Such Great Heights,” a song by indie-pop outfit The Postal Service, was inescapable. The song hit the Billboard Hot Singles chart, unusual for an indie song at the time, and was featured in the film Garden State and in the series Grey’s Anatomy. It makes sense that music journalist DeVille would use the song as the title of his book, which explores how, in the early 2000s, indie rock “reached an exponentially larger audience and was utterly transformed in the process.” Indie rock was named after its original home in independent music labels, but at some point it changed to a label-agnostic genre that, DeVille writes, was marked by “a family tree of musical aesthetics” that started with late-1960s bands the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. DeVille traces 2000s indie rock to its “dance-party era,” when fans bopped along to the Dismemberment Plan, and through its forays into subgenres garage rock, “blog-rock,” “bloghouse” (associated with the “indie sleaze” era of fashion), indie folk, and more. He writes about the genre’s watershed moments: its popularity with television producers, who included indie songs in series like The O.C. and Gossip Girl, and the surprise Grammy wins of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. Indie rock, DeVille writes, “meant so many things that it came to mean nothing.” He doesn’t bemoan this, noting that the changes “started pulling the genre away from traditional white male power structures and toward the historical have-nots.” DeVille’s book is beautifully argued and free of strong opinions about particular bands or subgenres; he is here as a historian with admitted skin in the game—he’s a fan of the genre who observes, neutrally, how it has changed. This work is filled with smart arguments, gentle wit, and admirable acumen.
A must not just for rock fans, but for anyone interested in the intersection of music and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781250363381
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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