A knotty but worthy attempt to stoke new conversations about a genre sometimes dismissed as moribund.
An outline for an alternative history of soul music that emphasizes the intersection of blackness, struggle, and femininity.
As Vanderbilt English professor Lordi argues in this academic but spirited book, too much recent writing about soul music treats the genre as if it were trapped in amber. Though the music had a relatively brief moment of prominence on the charts in the late 1960s and early ’70s, it speaks to enduring elements of black experience that were often suppressed. To that end, the author’s guiding lights aren’t James Brown or Stax and Motown legends; rather, she spotlights the likes of Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, and Minnie Riperton, less-appreciated artists for whom “stylization of survival is conditioned by pain, often led by women, and driven by imagination, innovation, and craft.” Lordi shows how this attitude manifests through the artists’ song choices (often reinterpretations of pop hits by white artists), live ad-libs and false endings, and falsetto singing, which explores “how vulnerable it is permissible to be—how sexy, how extravagant, how cool and effervescent.” The author’s use of jargon is sometimes overly thick, especially when she tussles with the “post-soul” theorists who downplay the music’s themes of femininity and struggle. However, Lordi’s distinct takes on the genre are refreshing, built on close listening to artists like Riperton and Donny Hathaway and explorations of albums that reside outside the soul canon. (Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul and Aretha Frankin’s live gospel album Amazing Grace draw special attention.) The author’s argument for soul’s continuing relevance would be stronger with more contemporary examples, but she concludes with some brief but thought-provoking commentaries on artists like Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe. They are, she writes, representative of what she calls “Afropresentism,” a mindset that is beholden neither to the past nor Afrofuturist fantasias but instead speaks to black struggles in the moment.
A knotty but worthy attempt to stoke new conversations about a genre sometimes dismissed as moribund.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4780-0959-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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