A knowledgeable, earnest, always persuasive testament to a cultural touchstone.
A study of Radiohead’s 2000 classic album and how two decades have validated its dystopian vision.
Uproxx cultural critic Hyden, author of Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, among other music books, believes that Kid A, the British band’s fourth album, is a masterpiece. For music fans today, that’s an unprovocative, almost banal assertion. But as he notes in detail, the album received mostly middling and hostile reviews at the time, with the notable exception of Pitchfork, a then-little-known tastemaker that awarded the album its highest grade of 10.0. Like all innovative works of art, Kid A baffled many at first. Radiohead’s blend of proggy structures and glitchy electronics was new; the obsessive internet music culture that leaked the album early was new; singer Thom Yorke’s cynicism about our tech-sodden existence was new. And all of it was “weirdly prescient,” a “tone poem about our ‘doomed-to-be-extremely-online’ lives,” as Hyden puts it. His book is partly standard-issue band history, covering Radiohead’s path from “Creep,” the early megahit that threatened to make them one-hit wonders, to their present-day efforts to maintain their perch as innovators. But Hyden also argues that the album captured the zeitgeist both then and now. The author finds a Kid A sensibility in contemporary movies like Vanilla Sky and Fight Club as well as in the twitchy discomfort delivered by our social media addictions. Today, Radiohead’s push-me-pull-you relationship with the traditional record industry is the norm. Though Hyden extrapolates too much cultural import from one album—Kid A wasn’t alone in railing against “soul-destroying remnants of omnipresent corporate culture,” after all—he is an intelligent and often amusing guide to its creation. The original reporting is slim, but the author writes like the best kind of music fan: informed and inviting. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A knowledgeable, earnest, always persuasive testament to a cultural touchstone.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-84568-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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