Loud but often overlooked, drummers get their due in this entertaining survey.
Pounding it out.
Music writer Lingan wastes no time in explaining why he chose drummers as the subject of his new book: “Why shouldn’t drums and drummers get a chance to be the main characters of this story for once, after shaping it continuously for so long?” The 15 chapters that follow, each about an influential percussionist, put the musicians in the spotlight, and it makes for fascinating reading. Lingan covers many of the usual suspects—Ringo Starr of the Beatles, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin—and skillfully explains their innovations and the influence they had on the rock world. But it’s the non-household names that are truly interesting and that bring out some of the author’s best writing. On Hal Blaine’s performance on the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” he writes, “It’s more than a beat, really, it’s a unique feel, as much as the Cuban clave or a blues shuffle.” And he writes that Al Jackson Jr.’s memorable drums on Booker T. & the M.G.’s “Green Onions” “give the song its danger, too, its military stride.” Lingan does a terrific job explaining the technical aspects of drumming to a lay audience; this book is accessible to any rock fan, even ones who don’t know the difference between a snare and a tom. There is, unfortunately, one flaw: Of the 15 drummers featured, only one—Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground—is a woman. Lingan does give brief shout-outs to female drummers, including Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney), Sandy West (the Runaways), and Gina Schock (the Go-Go’s), but any one of them could have had her own chapter, to say nothing of Karen Carpenter, one of the greatest musicians to ever sit behind the kit, who doesn’t even get a mention.
Loud but often overlooked, drummers get their due in this entertaining survey.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781668056240
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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