A serviceable, readable overview. There’s not much here that informed music fans—readers of Peter Guralnick and Greil...
From race records to hip-hop and beyond: an exploration of the business of recorded music.
Irish music producer Murphy begins his survey in 1853, when the first practicable idea for a sound recording device entered history. Then, the author immediately jumps into the age of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, who took the idea to town. The recording industry began as an adjunct of the machine and not the other way around, though its early practitioners discovered that ditties such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Maple Leaf Rag” did very well in a marketplace curious for technological novelties. Even though, as Murphy notes, “many established singers and entertainers were terrified of this peculiar science,” recordings became a big business, bringing great wealth to studio heads and music publishers—and even some to the artists. The author examines many familiar stories—for one, Sam Phillips’ fire-sale transfer of the rights in Elvis Presley’s recordings to RCA for $40,000, just in time for Elvis’ version of “Blue Suede Shoes” to sell 1 million copies—though he makes an extended case study of the less-well-known saga of Jac Holzman, the mastermind behind Elektra Records, which branched out from folk to rock at just the time Bob Dylan plugged in at Newport. Murphy can be entertainingly dishy, as when, speaking of Dylan, he recounts an ugly spat over the division of spoils between Dylan and budding mogul David Geffen, who sneered, “Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life.” However, Murphy devotes too much space to stars (anyone for yet another Gene Simmons spotting?), with rather by-the-numbers recitations of their rises to fame. The author does not spend enough of the narrative on the behind-the-console and back-office figures who make up any essential crew, the attention to Holzman notwithstanding.
A serviceable, readable overview. There’s not much here that informed music fans—readers of Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus, say—won’t have heard.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04337-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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