A well-researched, invigorating celebration of a spirited art form.
How performance poetry evolved.
Bennett, a Dartmouth English professor and poet who counts Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships among his many honors, traces the widespread cultural influence of spoken word poetry, from its 20th-century beginnings in New York to its 21st-century proliferation in digital media. Melding archival sources, autobiographical reflections, and “interviews with living legends in the field of poetry and performance,” the author traces the 50-year history of a vibrant literary form whose most prominent figures have been Black and brown poets, including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. A highlight of Bennett’s career came in 2009, when he was invited to recite a poem at the Obama White House. Asked to respond to the theme of communication, the nervous University of Pennsylvania undergraduate chose an ode about his relationship with his older sister, who is deaf, “and by extension my relationship to ASL, which I had struggled to learn as a child.” It was his first professional performance but not the first time he performed before an audience. That came in 1999, when he was 11 and his mother insisted that he enter a poetry slam—a competition among poets—at his local library; he won second place. Bennett underscores the importance of clubs, cafes, poetry slams, and open mics in providing opportunities for spoken word poets to share their work and discover a sense of community. He profiles many individuals who have devoted themselves to fostering that community, such as Miguel Algarin, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; and Marc Smith, who began a performance competition at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago in 1984 that evolved, by 1990, into the National Poetry Slam. Bennett sees TV (the series Def Poetry ran for six seasons), video, and the internet as positive forces, allowing new audiences to experience the energy and intensity of performance poetry.
A well-researched, invigorating celebration of a spirited art form.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780525657019
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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