A lovingly assembled tribute to an artist whose literary gifts complemented her musical ones.
A diverse collection of personal and journalistic writings from the late folk singer.
To the music world, Mary Travers (1936-2009) is best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the popular 1960s folk-singing act. Their recordings of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon” were the soundtrack of a generation in transition. But most audiences may not be aware of Travers’ talent as a keen, observant writer. This new collection of writings, published five years after her death, showcases that side of her through eloquent essays (some previously unpublished), columns she wrote for the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times in the 1980s, and several poems. It’s neither a straightforward memoir nor an in-depth chronicle of her success in Peter, Paul and Mary; rather, each chapter is devoted to a particular theme. It begins poignantly with Travers’ reminiscences of growing up in New York City and her friendship with an African-American maid who became like a second mother to her. Next, she offers insightful wisdom about the art of singing and the ins and outs of the music business (“Managers, agents, lawyers have hostile attitudes toward artists. Most of them think that the artists are ding-dongs,” she writes). Another chapter features her writings about her political views and activism, through her travels to the Philippines, the Soviet Union and South Korea during the 1980s (“I spoke; I sang out against oppression; I got involved”). Among the book’s highlights are transcriptions of interviews Travers conducted as host of her own radio program in the 1970s with Bob Dylan, Richie Havens and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. Although the book tackles some serious subjects—including an illegal abortion Travers had at a young age, and the poverty she witnessed in the Philippines—it also reveals her humorous side, particularly through her onstage monologues. On the topic of growing old, she says, “I am technologically challenged....I’m the kind of person when it doesn’t work, I kick it.” Overall, the book presents a portrait of someone who was relatable and down-to-earth. “There was much more to Mary than the public ever knew,” writes her friend and bandmate Peter Yarrow in the book’s foreword. Fortunately, through this collection, the world will now have the opportunity to know Travers as more than just a folk singer.
A lovingly assembled tribute to an artist whose literary gifts complemented her musical ones.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492871293
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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