An affectionate homage to an indisputably great song, one that readers will listen to with new ears.
A lively biography of the song that Bob Dylan once called the greatest ever written.
Musical maven and GQ editor-in-chief Jones (David Bowie: A Life, 2017, etc.) is plainly smitten by Jimmy Webb’s unlikely story of a telephone repairman who rides a cherry picker into the sky in order to attend to malfunctioning wires, which the author calls “the first existential country song.” That may or may not be true, but it is unforgettable, one of the city-named story-songs that propelled Glen Campbell to fame and a natural successor to Webb and Campbell’s previous hit, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Webb considered “Lineman” incomplete when he gave it to Campbell, and indeed it is light on lyrics, certainly as compared to his opus, “MacArthur Park.” Campbell ran with it, turning to the extraordinary talents of the session cohort called the Wrecking Crew, with bass player Carol Kaye doing beyond-the-call-of-duty work with her improvised introduction. One flaw that Jones uncovers: Webb had the hero of the song fixing the wrong kind of wire—a high-tension line can experience an overload but not a telephone line, leading him to remark ruefully, “it’s very hard to explain poetic license to a union member.” Still, poetic license aside, the song is instantly recognizable and consistently makes critics’ lists of the best pop songs of its era, if not of all time. Jones focuses ably on meaning and affect, more as they have to do with the lyrics than with the unusual chord pattern, which makes the song so distinctive; a little more attention to the structure of the music and how it evolved would have pleased the hearts of geeks. Even so, the author’s account satisfies, without a wasted word or the usual clichés of pop-culture writing and with plenty of quotations from the principals involved in making the song an enduring hit.
An affectionate homage to an indisputably great song, one that readers will listen to with new ears.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-571-35340-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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