bookshelf

LOU HARRISON

Name: LOU HARRISON
Author: Leta E. Miller
ISBN: 0-19-511022-6

COMPOSING A WORLD

by Leta E. Miller & Fredric Lieberman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1998

bookshelf

That this biographical study of composer, polymath, and activist Lou Harrison began as an oral history explains a lot; its cozy tone betrays long exposure not only to octogenarian Harrison himself, but also the dizzying orbit of progressive artists, musical and otherwise, with whom he has come into contact over a long and diverse career. The authors, a musicologist/performer and ethnomusicologist/composer, respectively, do bring marked insight to the occasionally bewildering universe Harrison inhabits, devoting separate chapters to their subject’s researches into, and utilizations of, tonality, instrumentation, and tuning, among other nuts and bolts of musical process that this composer has drastically reconsidered. Harrison’s complex relationship with East Asian music is likewise treated at length, with particular emphasis on his works written for gamelan, of which the variable intonation would become for him a source of fascinated inspiration. With respect to extramusical issues—essential where Harrison is concerned—the authors weave the voices of their many sources to fine effect, finding continuity in his travails and accomplishments on both coasts and exploring the composer’s crucial decision to return to a culturally (and sexually) vibrant California in 1953. The freedoms he encountered there are not only to be found in Harrison’s music—they include a surprisingly sober chapter decoding gay “markers” in his oeuvre—but are evinced, the authors would seem to inply, in the very ubiquity of the music itself. If, then, one can move below the current of obsequy that runs throughout the book, there is much strong scholarship to be found; the authors— appreciation of the many formal risks that underlie Harrison’s eclecticism, as of the deep humanity that drives it, allows for an unusually clear portrait of an artist whose restless pursuit of beauty has driven him from medium to medium, most often beyond the public eye. (20 b&w illustrations, not seen; CD included)

Pub Date: July 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-19-511022-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)