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MUSIC

A SUBVERSIVE HISTORY

A bold, fresh, and informative chronicle of music’s evolution and cultural meaning.

A revisionist history highlights music’s connections to violence, disruption, and power.

In a sweeping survey that begins in “pre-human natural soundscapes,” music historian Gioia (How To Listen to Jazz, 2016, etc.) examines changes and innovation in music, arguing vigorously that the music produced by “peasants and plebeians, slaves and bohemians, renegades and outcasts” reflected and influenced social, cultural, and political life. For the earliest humans, writes the author, music-making was far more important than simply entertainment: Songs “served as a source of transformation and enchantment for individuals and communities,” embodying myth and cultural lore. Music also was indelibly connected to violence, from troops’ drums and horns to rousing anthems. “Every violent group in history,” Gioia notes, “has its motivating songs,” evidence that music “is a mighty force” for change. Disruption, however, was not limited to martial music. Once the audience emerged “as the judge of aesthetic merit during the late medieval period and Renaissance,” music changed from an art sanctioned by aristocracy and the church to one that pleased “the untutored crowd.” Popular musicians presented themselves as dramatic, artistic personalities; when they offered works celebrating “love and glory, the singer emerged as the focal point of the lyrics, the real subject of every song.” Gioia aims to overturn long-held images of many composers: Beethoven, for example, was hardly “the ultimate classical music insider, the bedrock of the symphonic tradition,” but rather a passionate personality whose “strange, peculiar, arbitrary, bizarre, mysterious, gloomy and laborious” music caused him, early in his career, to be considered “a volatile outsider whose impulses needed to be held in check.” With Beethoven, writes the author, “everything gets viewed through a prism of revolution, upheaval, and clashing value systems.” That desire to upend the status quo has invigorated music, whether it is jazz, folk music, hip-hop, or electrified bands. Despite efforts to quash innovation, “in the long term, songs tend to prevail over even the most authoritarian leaders.”

A bold, fresh, and informative chronicle of music’s evolution and cultural meaning.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5416-4436-6

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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