A well-researched music biography best read with some traditional American folk songs playing in the background.
The story of the Weavers, “America’s most popular folk singers.”
It’s not exactly an untold story, given that one member of the group was Pete Seeger and on the fringes of the tale lurks legendary singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie, not to mention the coverage the group received in the popular 1982 documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t that a Time! Nevertheless, longtime music journalist Jarnow (Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, 2016, etc.) delivers a by-the-numbers biography of a band whose popular songs and covers earned them plenty of attention during the Red Scare and a place on the blacklist. Most readers think of folk groups as particularly tightknit, but the author reflects equally on the tensions within the group. “The band was a slow-functioning democracy under the best of circumstances,” he writes. On display, too, are the very different personalities of each member: Lee Hays, the contentious bass singer who co-wrote “If I Had a Hammer”; Fred Hellerman, the band’s unsung producer and arranger of songs; Seeger, the driven, multitalented banjo picker whose songs would go on to be huge hits for the next generation of artists like Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds; and Ronnie Gilbert, so popular at the time she was simply known as “The Voice.” The author also ably recounts dramatic scenes in the nation’s courtrooms—e.g., Seeger demanding, “do I have a right to sing these songs? Do I have a right to sing them anywhere?” There are also interesting cameos sprinkled throughout this colorful tale, from Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. organizing for civil rights to Bob Dylan—about whom Hellerman exclaimed, “he can’t sing, and he can barely play, and he doesn’t know much about music at all.”
A well-researched music biography best read with some traditional American folk songs playing in the background.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90207-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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