An exhaustive, illuminating life of Folkways Records founder Moe Asch, whose American and international folk-music releases laid the ground for the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s and the world-music explosion of recent years. Goldsmith (Anthropology/Dartmouth) details splendidly Asch’s background. Born in 1905 in Warsaw, he was the son of Sholem Asch, the eminent Yiddish writer, who moved his family to New York to escape WWI. The senior Asch’s peripheral association with leftist political causes, disregard of Jewish orthodoxies, marital infidelity, and neglect of his children were all passed on to Moe Asch, who studied broadcasting technology and gradually drifted into recording at the end of the 1930s. At first, he recorded and released only Jewish cantorial songs, but in 1941 he met, was bowled over by, and began recording the folk-blues singer Leadbelly. Asch was soon recording other jazz, blues, and folk performers, including Art Tatum, James P. Johnson, a very young Pete Seeger, and the erratically brilliant Woody Guthrie. In addition to recording new music, Asch issued out-of-print American records from previous decades, as well as ambitious field recordings from the American South, Europe, Africa, and beyond. Folkways, which Asch ran until his death in 1986, made available much of the folk-song library that a new generation of civil-rights activists and singers drew on in the ’60s. Artists like Seeger were deeply committed to progressive politics, and Goldsmith analyzes well how folk was claimed by the political left (Asch himself generally promoted political causes only implicitly). Asch is portrayed here as —frequently uncomfortable in the presence of others—an emotionally stunted, socially isolated person,— thus there’s inevitably a cloak of vagueness over his motivations as both man and businessman that detracts from reader interest. But as an examination of how Folkways successfully mined obscure veins of vernacular music for four decades, this is a valuable study. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56098-812-6
Page Count: 468
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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