This pleasing collection of short, intimate biographies of performers conveys the essence of the traditional country genre by focusing on icons such as Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Buck Owens, Chet Atkins, George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline. Dawidoff (The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, 1994) explores the masters of old-time country music (contemporary country stars such as Garth Brooks are dismissed as ``hat acts'') from the ``Father of Bluegrass Music,'' Bill Monroe, and his banjo player Earl Scruggs, both of whom cranked up country to breakneck speed, to country contemporaries in the old tradition, such as Emmylou Harris. Though chapters focus on one performer or act, Dawidoff frequently stresses the way in which friendships and collaborations keep country music vital. Many of his subjects provide rich, elucidating vignettes: Cash recalls the time he hit his pet ostrich with a plank and the bird retaliated by breaking three of the singer's ribs; Charlie Louvin, of the famous Louvin Brothers duet, notes that he still habitually moves off to one side of the microphone when he reaches the harmony part, making room for his long-dead brother; and George Jones, once a drinking terror, insists that he now enjoys nothing more than staying home and mowing his lawn. The author's reverence for his subjects is tempered with an astute assessment of their strengths and weaknesses: Johnny Cash, Dawidoff suggests, is a driven performer and self-mythologizer who has sustained a lengthy career by repeatedly repackaging the work produced during an early burst of creativity. Women country stars are well represented here, including Sister Rose Maddox and Sara Carter, among others. Dawidoff's fine book puts country music in its place: an American phenomenon with deep, heartfelt roots. The collection's thoughtfully notated discography will undoubtedly be used to feed the reader's new or rekindled interest in country music. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-41567-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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