by Nolan Gasser ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2019
Like Nathan Myhrvold’s like-minded explorations of cooking, Gasser’s enterprise has a pleasingly mad-scientist feel to it,...
A sprawling, packed-to-the-brim study of the art and science of music, as monumental and as busy as a Bach fugue.
Why does one person like the Rolling Stones and another like Celine Dion? Why does anyone like the Eagles? Are there human universals at play in musical preferences? Gasser, the polymathic mind behind Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project, probes the “sources, nature, and implications of our own, personal musical taste,” a taste that cannot always be easily reduced to buy- or listen-next algorithms. Music has features that are essentially invariant among human cultures: It is shaped by rhythm, “the overriding parameter wherein the listener gains an intuitive understanding of the music as a whole,” and it comprises melody, harmony, and other sonic elements. But more individually, our musical taste is shaped by all sorts of factors, socio-economic and psychological, that sometimes anticipate and sometimes follow “our membership in intracultures,” whether goth or mod or lite-classical. Gasser’s overarching aim is not just descriptive. In his forays into all imaginable corners of the musical world, he seeks to soften prejudices and broaden horizons, posing exercises and suggestions such as identifying syncopation in hip-hop tunes and appreciating the power of pre-Islamic chants sung by Saharan women “aimed at bringing the listener into a state of ecstasy.” The author’s body of examples—backed by a vast online site—is fittingly broad-ranging, featuring tunes from “Old MacDonald” to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide overture, all of which have something to say about why we like what we like. And while there’s no disputing taste, as the old Latin tag has it, there is much to know about how our psyches play in our musicality, what recreational drugs can contribute to the enjoyment of a Grateful Dead song, and the many ways in which music can make us better and happier people.
Like Nathan Myhrvold’s like-minded explorations of cooking, Gasser’s enterprise has a pleasingly mad-scientist feel to it, one that will attract music theory geeks as much as neuroscientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and Skynyrd fans.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-05719-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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