Sullivan may not capture the fiery soul of the best James Brown performance, but he shines a light on an important instance...
A music journalist looks at one of the soul legend’s key performances—as well as his overall legacy.
By the late ’60s, notes Boston Globe contributor Sullivan, Brown was “Soul Brother Number One to black America.” On April 5, 1968, one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Brown played what would become a landmark show at the Boston Garden. But the show almost didn’t occur. As the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods hovered on the verge of chaos—a fate that befell many cities around the country following King’s death—Garden officials and Mayor Kevin White decided to cancel the concert. However, after much negotiating with city counsilor Tom Atkins, activist Paul Parks and others, they agreed that “the concert would have a healing effect on the city”—especially since they decided to televise the event live. After an argument over the fee for his appearance, the Godfather of Soul took the stage, pleading peace and turning in an electric, if somewhat ragged, performance. Because most of the audience who couldn’t make it to the show chose to watch at home, Boston’s streets remained mercifully free of violence. With serviceable prose, Sullivan ably navigates the many conflicting allegiances surrounding the event, taking time to chronicle Brown’s rise to fame and the concurrent increase in civil-rights agitation and its reflection in the music of the time. He charts Brown’s burgeoning relationship with Al Sharpton and other civil-rights leaders, and examines the backlash the entertainer endured when he supported Richard Nixon. (During a 1973 performance at The Apollo, one banner read, “James Brown, Nixon’s Clown.”) Throughout the narrative, Sullivan provides intermittently insightful commentary on Brown’s music, duly recognizing that “his crucial innovation was to hear each instrument in his orchestra as another form of percussion.” Continuing in that vein, the author closes by citing musicians whose sound was most directly influenced by Brown, including Afrika Bambaataa, Run-DMC, Marley Marl and Big Daddy Kane.
Sullivan may not capture the fiery soul of the best James Brown performance, but he shines a light on an important instance of music affecting real change.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-592-40390-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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