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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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