Warts-and-all nostalgia evokes the undeniable power of the Motown sound.
Precisely rendered account of the Motor City hit factory’s rise, fall, and corporatized rebirth.
“The music was vital, of course, but what was most fascinating was the cast of characters,” comments veteran journalist Posner (Killing the Dream, 1998, etc.). Motown’s improbable success depended on founder Berry Gordy Jr. He was a poor student who lacked his family’s strong work ethic, but Gordy (alongside early collaborator Smokey Robinson) developed fierce enthusiasm for Detroit’s music scene. His initial efforts at songwriting and band management convinced him that success lay in an independent record label with in-house production and distribution within the still-segregated “urban” (i.e., African-American) markets. Beginning in 1958 with Tamla Records, Gordy launched several small labels that culminated in Motown’s mid-’60s dominance of the pop charts and indisputable contribution to cultural desegregation. Initially, Posner portrays Gordy’s fledgling music powerhouse warmly, depicting a family-run atmosphere that nurtured unschooled musicians: the fiercely ambitious Supremes from the Brewster projects; Marvin Gaye, who nervously auditioned for Berry at the 1960 Christmas party; and youthful Stevie Wonder, who was virtually adopted by Gordy. However, contractual arrangements heavily favored the company, keeping musicians on modest salaries while billing them for all expenses. As a result, “numerous Motown artists eventually challenged their contracts . . . over years of aggressive litigation.” Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in 1968, alienating Detroit-based performers like Martha Reeves and Gaye. In the ’70s, Gordy had some successes (the Jackson 5) but made ill-advised forays into film production and lost touch with Motown’s operations. The resulting mismanagement, exacerbated by alleged drug abuse and payola, contributed to the defections of Gaye, the Jacksons, and Gordy’s ex-paramour Diana Ross; the company was sold to MCA and other investors in 1988. Although Posner’s tone seems rather dry for depicting such joyous music, his clearly detailed account of this prototypical minority-owned business unearths many fascinating cultural touchstones, such as the pressure felt by Motown’s artists to avoid alienating white audiences with political outbursts.
Warts-and-all nostalgia evokes the undeniable power of the Motown sound.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50062-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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