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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
