A spirited, even adventurous look at the mysteries of how the human brain perceives and processes sound—and even, on...
“I’m a bad singer. And deep down, it matters.” Falling down a rabbit hole in B-minor, Canadian science writer Falconer (Magazine Journalism/Ryerson Univ.; That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia and the End-of-Life Care, 2009, etc.) explores all that bad singing entails.
The author grew up in the golden age of pop music, but he lacked the ability to carry a tune. As he writes, his siblings were similarly unable to distinguish notes and pitches, to the point where one sister could not even tune a guitar well enough to take the lessons that might have given her a fighting chance. Once grown up, Falconer marched into practice rooms and laboratories to figure out what’s taking place between the ears—and, to boot, what’s happening at the intersections of music and technology. We don’t really need to sing in order to enjoy a song, he writes, “any more than we need to paint to enjoy Vermeer or Monet or Basquiat.” But that equation doesn’t quite hold up, since we don’t gather around to group-paint but do, as Falconer notes, come together in song—or at least once did, since group songs are harder to come by, given the fragmentation of the market. Back on topic and in quest of the dulcet tone, the author examines the neurological and physical tricks that go into our ability to match pitch to voice control—to sing on key, that is, a talent not everyone has. At the far fringes of his amiable researches are amusiacs, those who for whatever reason cannot process music but few of whom admit as much lest “other people will consider them inhuman.” At the nearer edge are such wonders as software that allows even the most tone-deaf among us hit the notes, tortured though they may be in real life. So look out, Kayne….
A spirited, even adventurous look at the mysteries of how the human brain perceives and processes sound—and even, on occasion, manages to make beautiful music.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1770894457
Page Count: 304
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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