An exuberant tour through a pivotal year in the development of popular music and culture.
The longtime music journalist and founder of Mojo and Q delivers a month-by-month breakdown of the year that changed pop music history.
On New Year’s Eve 1970, Paul McCartney issued a writ of dissolution for the Beatles in Britain’s High Court. The anecdote, recalled by Hepworth (The Secret History of Entertainment, 2004) in the opening of his entertaining exploration of the year in music that was 1971, is a tidy reference to the changing moods in popular music and culture. “The sixties ended that day,” he writes. “You might say this was the last day of the pop era.” As a new era dawned, the potential for artists seemed limitless. Album-oriented rock was replacing the single-driven pop machine, allowing a wider range of artists to express themselves in unique and creative ways. In retrospect, it might seem easy to gloss over just how radical the musical landscape of 1971 was and how many disparate artists were releasing music and becoming superstars, which itself was a new phenomenon that was turning singers into de facto royalty—a fact epitomized by the wedding of Mick and Bianca Jagger. Hepworth tracks the changes that created this new environment, including a changing industry marketplace, new technological developments such as the synthesizer, and a rising generation of new listeners. The author painstakingly recounts the album releases, Top of the Pops performances, and endless touring dates that defined the year. Attempting to list the artists who dominated album charts, media, and collective consciousness of the year only proves the embarrassment of riches at Hepworth’s disposal: the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Carly Simon, Marvin Gaye, the Who, Sly Stone, and Carole King, to name just a few. The author’s chronicle of the year is loaded with gossipy anecdotes, adroit criticism, and earnest affection for the musicians, record executives, and technicians who defined it.
An exuberant tour through a pivotal year in the development of popular music and culture.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-399-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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