A well-tempered song of praise.
New York Times editor Whitney (Spy Trader, 1993) crafts a joyful and well-versed celebration of the pipe organ in American musical history over the past century.
For sheer musical power and sonority, pipe organs are hard to beat. The author, who has been playing them for 40 years, here chronicles the struggle for the soul of the organ that took place in the US during the 20th century. He starts with Ernest Skinner, an organ builder who developed the eclectic electropneumatic instrument with its smooth orchestral sound, and continues through the renaissance of the classic baroque tracker-action organ. Whitney has a fine old time describing the architecture of the instruments from windchest to whistle, as well as their special qualities, strengths, and weaknesses. Occasional ventures “up to the chirping stops of the one-foot sifflote on the positive,” or “the enclosed swell division with a romantic voix celeste” give us a peek into the musicality of the nomenclature, without being so frequent as to become annoying. The author introduces other makers, including G. Donald Harrison, who brightened Skinner's instruments and then spearheaded the classic revival, and Charles Fisk, who revived the eclectic organ. Whitney also profiles the enormously popular organists Virgil Fox and E. Power Biggs, ably reflecting the character of each: strict, cool, clipped Biggs, who along with Harrison championed the return of an organ that Bach and Handel would have recognized as their own; and colorful, dashing, brilliant Fox, who loved the orchestral organ for its ability to show off his romantic, 19th-century playing style. But the star here is the pipe organ itself, pneumatic or tracker, with its great peals of sound that in the hands of someone like Bach render the instrument “awe-inspiring in its majesty and solemnity, proclaiming the power and the order of the universe.”
A well-tempered song of praise.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59648-173-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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