A rich, insightful account of how rock music catalyzed a new world.
Exuberant music infused jolts of sex, drugs, and rebellion into civilization, according to this intricate history of rock music’s Golden Age.
Music writer Cosby surveys rock’s high-water era of the late 1950s through the 1970s, when it reigned as the world’s dominant genre of popular music and gained a new artistic depth and prestige. His interpretive narrative moves from Elvis Presley’s fusion of Black bluesman, white hillbilly, and matinee idol to Bob Dylan’s amalgamation of visionary folk prophecy and electric rock to Motown, the Grateful Dead and the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene, the Velvet Underground’s proto-punk evocations of narcotic squalor, and the 1970s reign of heavy-metal deities Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Ted Nugent. Presiding over the book are the Beatles, whose singular songwriting genius, capacious humanism, and avid embodiment of trends—from hand-holding to pot-smoking, beards, psychedelia, and meditation—made them all things to all men and all shrieking girls. Cosby gives comparable weight to the Rolling Stones; in his telling, they’re the dark, bad-boy yin to the Beatles’ bright yang, and the originators of the rock-star ethos of heedless, entitled debauchery. (“We are not worried about petty morals,” Cosby quotes Stones guitarist Keith Richards sniffing at his 1967 marijuana possession trial.) Cosby entwines his sketches of rock’s evolution and the musicians who crafted it with smart commentary on contemporary social upheavals and cultural artifacts, from the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War to the sitcom The Brady Bunch (the bland, wholesome antithesis of rock); he argues that, by undermining parental, religious, and sexual restraints, and celebrating Dionysian emotional freedom and individual authenticity, rock became an essential lens through which we understand “the ongoing arc of Western civilization.” Cosby’s vivid, perceptive prose captures the visceral impact of rock music while unearthing its roots in intense experiences and novel ways of life. The result is a compelling look at why, how, and where rock ’n’ roll has moved us.
A rich, insightful account of how rock music catalyzed a new world.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476693699
Page Count: 296
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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