Built around the names, including Charlie Parker, James Brown and the “King,” that helped define 20th-century American music, a history of the independent record label in America. Kennedy (Jelly Roll, Bix and Hoagy, 1994) and McNutt (We Wanna Boogie: An Illustrated History of the American Rockabilly Movement, not reviewed) tell their tale of how the independent label and the music business as a whole have evolved by looking at ten storied labels, ranging from early jazz giant Paramount to the legendary Sun Records. The pair begin with 1920s start-up label Gennett Records, home to some of the earliest known jazz recordings and to a then unknown musician by the name of Louis Armstrong. The Gennett history, as is the case with each of the other nine stories, is brimming with fun, interesting tidbits, such as a detailed explanation of the genesis of Hoagy Carmichael’s classic “Stardust,” originally named “Star Dust.” The two authors clearly know their music and the circumstances surrounding how that music was made, but the facts suffer at times from the dryness of the writing. In his preface, noted session man and current Berklee School of Music professor Al Kooper writes of the importance of passion and how that motivated the giants who started these labels. Kooper also speaks of how that passion has filtered into this volume; would that it were so. The fervor evident from their research doesn’t filter into the writing, with the exception of the first-hand accounts that appear too infrequently. A retelling from Ace Records’ John Vincent of how a conversation with Sam Phillips prompted him to go into the music industry has both the humor and excitement often lacking in the rest of the book. Still, those interested in the subject will find enough historical information to keep their attention until the end.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-253-33548-5
Page Count: 183
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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