Well-meaning but disappointing: a history in search of a subject. (45 b&w illustrations)
Pianist and composer Isacoff delves into “equal temperament,” the18th-century tuning system that carved the octave into 12 equal intervals.
When a Renaissance musician tuned a musical instrument according to the dictates of the Church-approved ancient Greeks, it could be played only in certain keys and was limited to intervals of the octave, fifth, and fourth. This was not a problem until keyboard instruments came into prominence and composers made increasing use of the third and sixth intervals. Unpleasant sonorities resulted from the old tuning, and compositions were rendered unplayable. Kepler, Newton, and Rousseau were among the period’s leading thinkers who took part in the search for a better tuning system. Many elaborate and convoluted solutions were proposed, but equal temperament was the least elegant and most pragmatic, dividing the 12 tones within the octave into 12 equal intervals. Flying as it did in the face of tradition, this solution unsurprisingly drew fierce opposition, but it ultimately prevailed. Painting a vast backdrop for his arcane subject, Isacoff often strays too far afield. He devotes page after page to other admittedly fascinating intellectual issues, from perspective to planetary motion, and although he writes well and lovingly about almost all of them, it’s jarring when he realizes he must return to the matter at hand and thus wrenches the narrative back to the more mundane topic of temperament. And he betrays an anachronistically secular view when he describes early harmonic compositions as the result of “bored monks in search of amusement” without providing any evidence of this alleged boredom. Most difficult to fathom is Isacoff's mere passing reference to Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier,” surely the most eloquent and staggeringly ingenious endorsement of equal temperament and surely worthy of a few more lines of commentary.
Well-meaning but disappointing: a history in search of a subject. (45 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40355-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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