A fascinating journey led by a passionate guide.
Emotionally wrenching music from northwestern Greece evokes questions about the meaning of music itself.
King, a Grammy-winning producer, describes himself as an “obsessed” collector of 78 rpm phonograph records, counting among his treasures American folk music and Delta blues recorded in the 1920s and ’30s. In his exuberant literary debut, he recounts his discovery of music far different from any that he had heard before, music so intense and transformative that it set him on a quest to find its cultural roots and to decipher “a larger enigma: why we make music.” In 2009, the author was vacationing in Istanbul when he noticed a dusty collection of records on a shop shelf. Buying a few, he carefully transported the fragile discs home and, with great anticipation, played them. The sound, he writes, was startling: “a dissonant instrumental played with an uncontrolled abandon”; a clarinet “sounded as if it were in the throes of death—bent, contorted, and skirting along the margins of control.” The music came from Epirus, a remote region in northwestern Greece that had “steadfastly resisted assimilation” for thousands of years. After acquiring hundreds more records, King made several trips to the mountain villages of Epirus to investigate the “musical biosphere” from which the viscerally shattering sounds emerged. He locates one origin of the music in “laments and funeral dirges,” which evolved from metrical poetry into instrumental pieces: “a calculated wailing through an instrument such as the clarinet or the violin” that represented “collective remembrance” rather than the commemoration of one individual. In Epirus’ sheepherding villages, the shepherd’s flute, he believes, was the foundation of all the music that ensued. Participating in festivals, learning traditional dances, drinking the “psychotropic grape distillate” tsipouro, interviewing musicians, collectors, and scholars, King concludes that the “preeminent purpose” of music in Epirus was “therapeutic and curative to the individual and the village.” Music, he writes, “was a tool for survival.”
A fascinating journey led by a passionate guide.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24899-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
A history, published in Britain shortly after the author wrote it in 1937, of the few months surrounding the Barcelona Telephone Exchange riots and what the writer determines as the Communist betrayal of all of Spain's anti-fascist forces. The crux of Orwell's writing is to show the ridiculous misrepresentations of the actual happenings in Barcelona and on the front and their meaning for the rest of Spain. The Communists were joined with the Government. Another anti-fascist faction was the P.O.U.M. or anarchist militia. They were closely allied with socialist worker movements, ready to build up a workers' revolution. In the beginning when issues were but hazily defined, Orwell joined the P.O.U.M. and fought with them- at the front. The Communists, considering anarchist-socialist revolutionary policies as presumptive, sought successfully to purge the P.O.U.M. and rendered them through messy journalism, coercive police methods, withdrawal of arms, false reports- as Trotskyists, pro-Franco, anything but the potent patriotic force they were. Thus republican Spain lost a power that could have helped beat Franco. Orwell's report is as exciting as it is meditative. With his quiet exactitude the midnight skirmishes, the political issues, and the utter futility of war come clearly into focus. Perhaps not a book to create sensation in a day when much of what happened at Barcelona has been realized, but one enlightening in terms of showing the war way toward mutual understanding and fair play.
Pub Date: May 15, 1952
ISBN: 1849025975
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1952
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
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