An ambitious, demanding work on neglected Black artists.
A professor examines Black opera artists’ struggle for recognition.
In 1925, more than 250 Black sopranos entered the Ferrari Fontana Vocal Trials at a Harlem branch of New York Public Library. The prize was free vocal lessons from the tenor and the start of an opera career. That the winners received neither lessons nor a career had much to do with “the racist ideology and practices that barred them from major US operatic institutions.” Fortunately, that “never prevented Black artists from engaging with opera in creative and complex ways.” In this well-researched study of Black soloists, composers, supernumeraries, and others from the first half of the 20th century, most of them women, Caplan, a historian on race and culture, tells the story of their “transformative impact on opera.” She coins the term “Black operatic counterculture” to refer to Black artists’ efforts to redefine opera and “yield new artistic and political meanings.” Among the artists she celebrates are Shirley Graham, whose 1932 opera Tom-Tom was “the first opera by a Black woman produced by a major opera company,” and Marian Anderson, who in 1955 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, “the first time the company would engage a Black singer in a leading role.” Not surprisingly for a scholarly work, this book has dense thickets of academic prose, such as when Caplan writes that Sylvester Russell, a Black theater critic, had “reoriented prominent models of cultural hierarchy toward liberatory ends.” That’s a pity, especially for a book about an art form often accused of being elitist and difficult. But readers untroubled by tall weeds will find a thoughtful introduction to figures who deserved greater fame and a sobering account of the racism they endured, as when instructors told soprano Anita Patti Brown that she had talent but would never become an opera star because “your color is against you.”
An ambitious, demanding work on neglected Black artists.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780674268517
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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