Sheffield is the right writer for this book, but its hasty production is evident on nearly every page.
A critic’s earnest elegy for the late rock star’s influence on music, fashion, sexuality, and personal transformation.
When David Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016, Rolling Stone writer Sheffield (Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke, 2013, etc.) was well-equipped to put his career in context. A cassette of Bowie songs was in his boom box when he got the news, and unlike many critics who gave up on Bowie during the creatively depleted 1990s, the author not only kept up, but believed the singer was in the midst of a career revival. That enthusiasm sloshes and froths in this mash note, which was crashed to publication in a month. Sheffield is prone to cringeworthy overstatement (Bowie delivered his final opus, “Blackstar,” because “he knew his death would make the world lonely”), head-scratching digressions (“C-3PO’s Bowie-est moment is Return of the Jedi”), and an overused and overly cute habit of ending paragraphs with snippets of Bowie lyrics. This is all unfortunate, because when Sheffield tones down his jazz-hands–y prose, he’s a cleareyed thinker about Bowie’s place in the pop firmament. Blending personal recollections with a mad dash through his discography, Sheffield persuasively tracks the influence of one TV performance of “Starman,” explores how Bowie’s omnivorous appetite for drugs shaped his persona and music, and—Sheffield’s particular emphasis—muses on how Bowie’s rejection of sexual, musical, and sartorial fetters made him a one-man safe space for at least two generations of outcasts. “Bowie was all about eroticizing what you don’t know for sure,” writes the author, a sentiment that seems exactly right. Sheffield wants to demystify his hero, but only so much; after all, his Sphinx-like presence was part of his charm. But a better book would explore his often perplexing metamorphoses, not just clumsily honor his “Ovid-like sense of constant mutation.”
Sheffield is the right writer for this book, but its hasty production is evident on nearly every page.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-256270-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
