A brash and thorough accounting of a crucial element of the funk firmament.
An oral history of the unsung women in the P-Funk universe.
Neblett is personally invested in this story: His mother, Mallia Franklin, was a backup singer with George Clinton’s pioneering acts Parliament and Funkadelic and was later a member of the spinoff women-led group Parlet. But the family connection doesn’t incline him to soften a story that, especially by the end of the ’70s, was consumed by infighting, power plays, and epic levels of drug abuse. Before that drama, though, P-Funk was a vibrant and pathbreaking commune, and women played a substantial part in it. Franklin introduced Clinton to bassist William “Bootsy” Collins, who deeply influenced the P-Funk sound; Lynn Mabry and Dawn Silva were veterans of Sly and the Family Stone and would later front the Brides of Funkenstein, Clinton’s most successful and critically admired offshoot. Neblett worked on this project for years, and he spoke to seemingly every relevant person in the P-Funk universe, from Clinton and Sly Stone and Collins to hangers-on and businesspeople. The book may be too bulky and filled with insider chatter for a casual reader, and the oral history structure restricts Neblett’s ability to put the P-Funk story in the context of larger trends in pop and R&B at the time. But the book is entertaining in itself, mainly on the strength of everybody’s candor. Misogyny was rampant, which was clear to anybody looking at Parlet and Brides record covers. (In theory, the visuals were meant to support Clinton’s Afrofuturist vision, but Franklin mocks the imagery as “space hoes.”) The disposability of the women extended to the groups’ ever-shifting lineups, in which they functioned mostly as backup singers, which is unfortunate; Neblett’s book suggests that a saner, more sober environment could have made the women stars. As Clinton succumbed to ever-deeper cocaine abuse, the women jumped (Mother)ship.
A brash and thorough accounting of a crucial element of the funk firmament.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781477332672
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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