A stellar work of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics.
A captivating group biography of four impressive British women composers.
In her first book, a vibrant narrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do. Each of her subjects wrote “exquisite, breathtaking music” and achieved “extraordinary” things. Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) is first. A rebellious, eccentric suffragette—she wrote the anthem “The March of the Women” in 1910—she is the “grande dame” of the book. Openly queer, she was a trailblazer for female conductors and composers. “When composing under the immediate influence of a muse,” writes Broad, “Ethel could write music that was both bold and intimate, sprightly and humorous, and always with a driving energy that stunned her listeners.” Her vast body of work would inspire others, including Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). A viola virtuoso, she spent much of her life in America, eventually settling there. Unlike Smyth’s initial pieces, Clarke’s first musical compositions were far more accepted and celebrated. In 1913, she was “one of only six women to play in the string section of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra—the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra.” Conservative and quiet, Dorothy Gertrude Howell (1898-1982) bonded with Smyth, and they “became threads in the rich tapestry of each other’s lives.” The “crunchy chords” in her early pieces, Broad writes, would become the “searing, intense, uncomfortable discords that make her later works so powerful.” Her 1919 symphonic poem, Lamia, was a huge success. Finally, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003) lived a complex life in the shadows. A star at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied piano and composition, she received a scholarship to score films and went on to become one of the first women to have a career as a film composer. Her affair and later marriage to the popular, married composer William Alwyn resulted in what Broad calls the “familiar” story: a woman’s work subsumed by the man’s.
A stellar work of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780571366101
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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