A satisfying, fun read that may prompt rifling through old CDs and LPs to reclaim one’s own transformative musical memories.
Music writing with a personal twist by an assortment of modern writers, including Joshua Ferris, James Wood, Pankaj Mishra and Kate Christensen.
It’s a testament to editor Terzian that only a handful of the essays involve falling in love. The tales encapsulate everything from horror to hilarity, ranging in approach from an almost academic inquiry into hidden codes and contradictions to deeply emotional recollections presented in a stream-of-consciousness collage. Thankfully, little of the writing resembles the cloying cleverness of modern music reviews. Another delightful surprise is that the albums aren’t defended as the best of or most important to the development of music, but as the most significant to a certain person at a precise moment in time. A good example is the essay on the Eurythmics album Savage, which Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) dismisses as musically subpar, but for which he still nurses a strong passion. Despite the diversity of backgrounds of the contributors, some common threads emerge. Many describe listening during the tumultuous period of adolescence, ricocheting between self hatred and self discovery. All are uniquely sensitive observers, and most shared a penchant for listening compulsively and repeatedly to that one cherished record. It’s somewhat regrettable that most of the music, with a few notable exceptions, comes from a limited era, the 1970s and ’80s. One memorable outlier is the ethereal and haunting chapter on American Primitive Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 –1939) by GQ correspondent John Jeremiah Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, 2004), which describes extremely rare shellac recordings of largely unknown black musicians before World War II. The book is undeniably best appreciated with a laptop close by to listen along with the albums described.
A satisfying, fun read that may prompt rifling through old CDs and LPs to reclaim one’s own transformative musical memories.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-157974-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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