There’s not much hard news for scholars of roots music, but for the rest of us, Sullivan offers a welcome exploration of how...
A pleasing survey of soul music, from Lead Belly to Johnny Otis to Michael Franti to Louis Farrakhan.
Say what? It’s not every history of African-American song that takes time to recall that Farrakhan, later famed as a Black Muslim leader and political activist, recorded several calypso albums in the 1950s. (Who knew, too, that actor Louis Gossett Jr. was once a Greenwich Village folkie?) Music journalist and Crawdaddy columnist Sullivan (The White Stripes: Sweethearts of the Blues, 2004, etc.) has a good eye for the little-explored detail, and she puts it to use in this digressive but generally impressive look at the role of music in the tumult and toil that was the era of the civil-rights movement. The author charts the much-related story of how the blues and its urban cousin jazz united to form rock, and then began “to converge in a powerful new strain of freedom music” delivered by the likes of Odetta, Richie Havens and Harry Belafonte and thence by thousands of artists of every ethnicity and description. Here, Sullivan’s subtitle does not serve her well, for more than survey the role of music in the civil-rights movement—itself a more adequate term than “black power,” even lowercase—Sullivan capably shows how black music fed into white music and white music fed back into the black source. For instance, she notes that soul pioneer Sam Cooke was so taken with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” that “he decided he should write his own protest song”—whence the classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Dylan, of course, was strongly influenced by Odetta, who in turn was shaped by Lead Belly and Marian Anderson, and so on, a great river of music that continues to feed us today.
There’s not much hard news for scholars of roots music, but for the rest of us, Sullivan offers a welcome exploration of how African-American popular music became America’s vernacular.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55652-817-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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