A fascinating look into an important chapter in cultural history. Braggs should return to the subject in more depth.
A study of a key epoch in the transition of jazz from a distinctively American music to an international art form.
Braggs (Africana Studies/Williams Univ.) uses the lives of jazz musicians largely as a way to study race relations in Paris from the 1940s through the 1970s. Sidney Bechet and Kenny Clarke, two major African-American figures, are featured in the first and final chapters. The lesser-known vocalist Inez Cavanaugh also gets a chapter. Such French musicians as clarinetist Claude Luter and pianist René Urtreger receive a fair share of attention, as do critics Hughes Panassié and Charles Delaunay. Farther afield, Braggs looks at James Baldwin, who spent much of his career writing about America from Paris, and French musician/novelist Boris Vian, who assumed a black identity for one of his novels and played jazz trumpet in a Paris club. Jazz lovers who expect new insights into the music are likely to be disappointed. Braggs is mainly interested in the adaptations they made to launch their careers in France, where initially racism appeared to be off the table. Black jazzmen certainly found fewer barriers, either professionally or socially, in France than in America. French critics and audiences considered African-Americans naturally superior to European musicians, at least as far as playing jazz. Bechet, undeniably a master, attained far greater acceptance in France than he ever did in America, and Clarke, one of the founders of bebop, became the first-call drummer for Parisian jazz sessions. Braggs provides interesting perspective on the “jazz wars” of the postwar era, when fans of traditional and modern styles fought it out. There is perhaps too much repetition—e.g., the author mentions at least three times Clarke’s role in getting Miles Davis to record a French film soundtrack. Also, while Braggs draws on a wealth of material, much of it in French, the book is necessarily dependent on secondary and tertiary sources.
A fascinating look into an important chapter in cultural history. Braggs should return to the subject in more depth.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-520-27935-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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