A good start on a rich subject.
A solid, readable academic inquiry into accordion technology and culture, showing how the instrument has adapted to changing times and trends.
This book holds plenty of interest for those who love accordion music, not merely academics who study the instrument or musicians who play it. (The author is both.) What Jacobson terms a “biography of the accordion” traces the development and popular appeal of an instrument that could function as a whole band, is much less expensive and more portable than a piano, followed the immigration patterns of Italians and Eastern Europeans and flourished in the American cities where they clustered, was all but killed by rock ’n’ roll, yet has found new life in a variety of different contexts. “The story of the accordion after 1908 is about people who at critical moments redefined the technology of the instrument as well as the culture surrounding the instrument,” writes the author. She documents the instrument’s various image makeovers, striving for the legitimacy of high culture while attempting to shake its associations with cheesiness, tawdriness (the instrument of the bordello and the saloon) and working-class ethnicity. Jacobson deservedly shines the spotlight on a variety of accordionists: Guido Deiro, who “experienced the most dramatic rise to success in accordion history” and was once married to Mae West; Dick Contino, a would-be teen idol; Myron Floren, far more of a virtuoso than Lawrence Welk; and Frankie Yankovic, a huge crossover recording success. Yet the author slights the likes of Clifton Chenier and zydeco, Flaco Jimenez and conjunto, Los Lobos and Cajun accordion music, focusing more on the less-indigenous Brave Combo and They Might Be Giants. The “Accordions Are In!” ad campaign for the Tiger Combo ’Cordion reflects the humor here that is too rare in academic writing.
A good start on a rich subject.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-252-03675-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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