A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius.
An ambitious, dynamic biography of J Dilla, who may be the most influential hip-hop artist known by the least number of people.
A professor at NYU/Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music best known for his chronicle of the business of hip-hop, The Big Payback, Charnas uses myriad storytelling techniques to make his case for the importance of James Dewitt Yancey (1974-2006), aka J Dilla. To explain Dilla’s groundbreaking approach to rhythm, the author uses graphics to approximate conventional rhythms and contrasts them with the hip-hop producer’s method of slowing some elements while accelerating others. He also offers playlists so readers can hear how Dilla transformed songs and how, eventually, his approach took over hip-hop in the late 1990s. To the author’s credit, he also explains why technological advances allowed other producers and DJs to mimic the sonic style Dilla pioneered—often with broader success, as producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis did on Janet Jackson’s chart-topping smash “Got Til It’s Gone.” Of course, Dilla generated his own hits, with important remixes like the Brand New Heavies’ “Sometimes” and, most notably, his production of Common’s “The Light.” His 2006 album, Donuts, is considered a classic of instrumental hip-hop. As definitively as Charnas chronicles Dilla’s rise through the ranks of Detroit hip-hop and his partnership with Q-Tip, Questlove, D’Angelo, and other significant figures, his reporting on how success didn’t solve all of Dilla’s personal problems or protect him from illness sets this tale apart. The author’s discussion of Dilla’s decline and death from a rare blood disease and lupus is particularly heart-wrenching, especially against the backdrop of his blooming career. Also memorable is Charnas’ chronicle of the family in-fighting that followed his death, which even spilled over into lawsuits against fan-created fundraisers at a time when Dilla’s work was finally being celebrated around the world.
A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-13994-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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