A unique and intoxicating blend of personal and urban history, music-biz thrill ride and unintentional elegy for a way of...
At a crossroads in his life, itinerant writer and music dabbler Cohn (Yes We Have No, 1999, etc.) dives into the messy realm of the New Orleans rap scene.
The author had nursed an abiding love of the Crescent City from the first time he discovered New Orleans jazz as a young Londoner. He lived there off and on beginning in the early ’70s, but when a ten-year-old black boy spit on him one day in 2000, Cohn realized “the climate had changed.” Aging and afflicted with hepatitis C, he didn’t simply turn from New Orleans in disgust; instead, he headed further in to confront his fears and rediscover just what it was that kept him coming back to this poverty-ridden city, crumbling long before Katrina’s catastrophic arrival. Gaining entrée to the roiling local rap culture by saying he wanted to write about it, Cohn ended up falling in love with the whole scene, eventually becoming (in affectingly tragicomic fashion) a producer of sorts. The chronicle of his adventures is a rowdy celebration of the anti-tourist Crescent City, a town of falling-apart projects where every block has its own nascent rap label and promising young stars fall victim to violence—or apathy. The author spends plenty of time painting a self-deprecating portrait of himself as an “Anglo-Irish Russian German South African Jew” and outsider, even though the rappers he moved among were impressed that he was writing a book and, more importantly to them, that he had contacts at record companies. He captures with vivid strokes a gallery of other characters: an entire universe of strivers and dreamers celebrating the very same ghetto life they were fighting to escape.
A unique and intoxicating blend of personal and urban history, music-biz thrill ride and unintentional elegy for a way of life now wiped from the earth.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4245-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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