This stellar book will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern technology’s startling effects...
Musician Dolby (Arts/Johns Hopkins Univ.) debuts with an absorbing account of his pioneering work merging digital music with film, technology, and science.
Born in 1958 to a Cambridge archaeologist, the author dropped out of school to pursue musical interests after finding a synthesizer in a dumpster. Often mixing sound for bands, he worked as a solo singer/songwriter, with such quirky hits as “She Blinded Me with Science” (1982) and “Hyperactive!” (1984), and began producing short silent film–like music videos as well as soundtracks for computer games and computer-generated animation. By the 1990s, Dolby’s unusual tinkering with computer software bridged the worlds of the music business and Silicon Valley, where his companies developed mobile-phone ringtones and other products. In this story-filled memoir, the author draws deeply on his experiences as a synthesized music guru and early internet geek, offering wonderful scenes involving such notables as Michael Jackson, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Steve Jobs, and George Lucas and revealing his battles for artistic control with major record companies. With little interest in the business side (“What’s a business model?” he replies to a venture capitalist interested in a Dolby company), he has always regarded himself as “a perfectionist who will choose great art over a pile of cash every time.” As a result, he struggled unhappily in the music and technology industries, both of which he deems “random and unjust.” Yet his innovative accomplishments, rendered in fascinating detail here, are legendary: “Synthesis, music videos, software, the Web, DIY filmmaking, mobile devices, online games…I just dived in and taught myself by trial and error.” The former TED Conference music director now composes on a restored 33-foot lifeboat in the garden of his home in Suffolk and teaches film and media at Hopkins.
This stellar book will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern technology’s startling effects on music and popular culture.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07184-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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