Cultural historian Waksman (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) debuts with an engrossing reconstruction of a rarely acknowledged ’secret history—: the role of the electric guitar in shaping contemporary commercial-music culture. Waksman is interested in both the instrument’s artistic-technological evolution and its emergence as a signifier of sexual potency and of youth-culture profitability. Though pure technology is not neglected here, Waksman focuses on a disparate gallery of personalities—Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Page—who were key players in this progression, as well as on the hardscrabble environments that nurtured this ragged-sounding music, from the early permutations of Nashville’s —Music Row— to the intense nightclub competitions of the 1950s Chicago blues scene. Waksman knits his history together by drawing surprising connections, such as the —accidental— crossovers between early guitar innovators like Depression-era bluesman Charlie Christian and both country maverick Chet Atkins, —Mister Guitar——whose playing tactics were, like Christian’s, rooted in more obscure ’swing— styles—and Les Paul, arguably the single individual most closely associated with the modernized electric guitar. Paul’s chapter is poignant, evoking first a youthful American archetype as a restlessly ambitious tinkerer, and eventually an equally domestic archetype he embodied along with his 1950s collaborator/then-wife Mary Ford. Later chapters trace the inevitable mutations of these masculine guitar-oriented pop archetypes. Shrewdly, Waksman focuses on Jimi Hendrix; Detroit’s —revolutionary— punk/noise-rock precursors, the MC5; and Led Zeppelin, eclectic experimenters who were also the progenitors of the bombastic, ultracommercial —cock rock— mode. Throughout, Waksman plays to both ax-heads and bookworms, so that prickly issues of race, sexuality, appropriation, commodification, and technical authorship are also addressed in this perceptive and overdue narrative of a singularly American machine. (23 halftones)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-674-00065-X
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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