bookshelf

INSTRUMENTS OF DESIRE

Name: INSTRUMENTS OF DESIRE
Author: Steve Waksman
ISBN: 0-674-00065-X

THE ELECTRIC GUITAR AND THE SHAPING OF THE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE

by Steve Waksman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2000

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

bookshelf

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

bookshelf

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.