A sprightly, entertaining hodgepodge of all things tuba.
The story of a musical instrument born out of the circus and brass bands.
In his latest book, Quinones, author of the award-winning Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, turns his attention to a lively search for the perfect tuba—and so much more. In the 1930s two tubas, the “almost mystical” Yorks, were made in Chicago. Quinones seems to have interviewed everyone who’s someone in the tuba world. He profiles Bill Bell, the first to record an album with the tuba as lead instrument and who became a member of John Philip Sousa’s band. He describes the famous “Tuba Woodstock” of 1971, when legions of tuba players descended on Indiana University, where the Tubists Universal Brotherhood Association was born. Readers meet Fred Marrich, who tried to corner the tuba market with his Tuba World store near Detroit. Quinones provides an in-depth profile of the celebrated music teacher Arnold Jacobs, owner of a prized York, who possessed “one of the most illustrious careers in American tubadom” and who played in the Chicago Symphony. He visits Roma, Texas, a “speck of a town” with a statewide-contending high school marching band directed by the illustrious Al Cortinas with young J.R. Trevino proudly holding forth on tuba. The author introduces us to Jim Self, who built a tuba hall on his roof. Then there’s Zig Kanstul, a “lone wolf among U.S. brass instrument makers,” and New Orleans’ Tuba Fats, a “mythical mountain of a man.” Sadly, steady tuba jobs, Quinones writes, are painfully scarce. The horn “can provide a living for only the tiniest fraction of the young people that its promise inspires.” And yet the instrument brings immeasurable joy to its players. He writes, “What is the tuba, anyway, if not a 12- to 18-foot tube for channeling imagination?”
A sprightly, entertaining hodgepodge of all things tuba.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781639735488
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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