A thorough survey showing how “there very well might be something irreducibly human about all the music of the Earth.”
An ambitious text that attempts to illuminate the history of music through the millennia and across world cultures.
In this follow-up to A History of Emotion in Western Music (2020), music professor Spitzer presents a history of humans and music that is dense in dates and facts but accessible. Readers need not understand music theory to follow the argument, although musical appreciation and some grounding in ancient history will be useful. The author’s sly humor (“Happiness is a warm lyre”) and knack for piquant observation ("Homer's sirens are as likely to have been whales as birds") help leaven the in-depth lessons, which Spitzer charts across three parts: life, history, and evolution. After a fine history of the development of musical ability in Home sapiens, the author turns to the three "killer apps" of Western music—notes, staff notation, and polyphony—which detached music from muscle memory, place and community, and the natural rhythms of speech. These three elements are much less prominent in the music of the Islamic world, concerned with ornament and the fluidity of the speaking voice; India, centered on underlying spiritual unity; and China, organized by timbre rather than pitch. Spitzer then investigates what made “Western classical music…so viral” (the score: music written down and disseminated beyond oral transmission) and where much of its future audience lives: Southeast Asia. Ultimately, the author regards the musical human as the "great synthesizer" of species, combining the rhythm of insects, melody of birds, musical tradition of whales, and social intelligence of apes. His interests range widely enough to include a discussion of musicians’ "late style," featuring examples as disparate as “the fruits of the ageing composer” and David Bowie's final album, Blackstar. Spitzer laments the widening "gap between listening and doing" in musical life, but he looks to the future with discussions of musical crowdsourcing, interactive composition, and audio implants.
A thorough survey showing how “there very well might be something irreducibly human about all the music of the Earth.” (Notes[395-451], Picture Credits[453], Acknowledgements[455-458], Index[459-470], A Note on the Author[471], A Note on the Type[473])Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-624-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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