A useful cultural history that is sure to please fans and musicologists.
The first “critical history” of Los Lobos.
In his debut, former Hollywood Reporter music editor and Billboard senior writer Morris presents an overview of the seminal California band’s four-decade career, focusing on how their musical palate expanded over time. A longtime supporter (his was one of the last weddings Los Lobos played), the author attributes “Los Lobos’ totemic position in L.A.’s musical firmament” to their unique background and the individual members’ restless open-mindedness. Initially, the youthful Mexican-American amateur musicians wanted to play traditional folk, in keeping with the era’s Chicano consciousness. As they honed this approach in raucous restaurant and wedding gigs, they also found themselves inspired by LA’s fertile post-punk scene, where they found kinship with bands like X and the Blasters. This incongruous fusion of Mexican music with punk’s reverence for rockabilly and roots paid off; fervent early supporters and the band themselves were startled by a Grammy win for an early EP. With their major label debut, "it became apparent to the band's producers that something new was afoot in Los Lobos' music." Still, no one expected that their titular single from the 1987 film La Bamba (a Richie Valens cover) would be a sudden chart-topper. Unable to match its commercial success, despite the prodding of several record labels, the band went on to a series of experimental, acclaimed (but underselling) albums. As Morris summarizes, “after hitting a creative wall amid the snares of rock stardom, they forged into terra incognita.” The author writes with an encyclopedic knowledge of California rock and effectively uses interviews with band members and producers. Although his primary focus is on a chronological analysis of the band’s recordings and their production, Morris also deftly addresses insider aspects of the music industry, much transformed since the 1970s, adding depth to this otherwise brief account while clarifying how Los Lobos survived changes in styles and label politics to become an enduring cross-cultural institution.
A useful cultural history that is sure to please fans and musicologists.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-292-74823-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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