One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds.
A bracing, inclusive look at the dramatic transformation in the way music was produced and listened to during the 20th century.
It wasn’t always something you heard at home or through an earpiece, writes music historian and journalist Wald (Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker’s Journey, 2006, etc.). “Until recording, music did not exist without someone playing it, and as a result music listening was necessarily social.” People went out to listen to bands, bought sheet music of the songs they liked and played it with family and friends. Even after the arrival of commercial phonograph recordings, people still went out, because they wanted to dance. Radio made professional music available at home and completed the change records had begun. Now musicians’ names were associated with popular songs, and people used to hearing a particular version on the air wanted to hear it when they went dancing as well. Wald emphasizes the important role of technology, which had at least as much impact as changing musical styles. In fact, he argues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll were not the apocalyptic breaks with the past depicted in conventional accounts. Female fans in particular tended to be receptive to new sounds, especially when embodied by a hot swing band or sexy, hip-swiveling Elvis, without feeling the need to throw out their Glenn Miller or Perry Como records. Wald rejects the purists’ disdain for popularizers like Paul Whiteman and the Beatles, who polished rough-hewn art forms and made them palatable to the mainstream. He doesn’t offer much truly new material, but he puts it together in fresh ways, with wonderful nuggets about the recording ban of the early 1940s and the impact of long-playing albums. It’s a shame the narrative essentially stops in the early ’70s, since Wald surely would have interesting insights about the fragmented, DIY world of MP3 players and musicians selling their product online.
One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-534154-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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