Fans of bluegrass and old-school country will enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at Monroe’s storied career.
A band mate recalls the life of Bill Monroe (1911-1996), perhaps the best-known popularizer of bluegrass in American musical history.
Guitar, mandolin, banjo, stand-up bass, and a high-lonesome yowl: Those are the classic elements of bluegrass, codified by the man from Kentucky. As so often happened, that highly stylized variant of country music was the product of the big city, courtesy of a Chicago-based radio program that propelled Monroe to early fame. Ewing (editor: The Bill Monroe Reader, 2000), who played guitar with Monroe for a decade, serves up a cognoscenti’s deep-dish version of bluegrass history that is not for the uninitiated: He writes in a typical passage of an influential forerunner of Monroe’s “who owned and played a snakehead A-4 (but who usually picked a mandola or tenor banjo) and whose musicianship and style had a definite impact on Bill.” If you don’t know that a Snakehead A-4 was a kind of mandolin made by Gibson in the 1920s, then you’ll be forgiven for being a little lost—but this is the kind of book whose readers will have command over the bluegrass arsenal. Without saying as much, the author shows how Monroe pioneered the festival circuit, jump-starting the famed Brown County Jamboree in Indiana. Though a purist in many ways, Monroe was also a pioneer of modern technology, perhaps the first major bluegrass musician to record digitally (“you can do several takes in a row and combine the best parts of each performance later,” explained his producer). Ewing also offers casual, unlabored portraits of other key players in the bluegrass scene who admired one another while nursing deeply competitive streaks, as when Monroe expressed some pique when the music magazine Sing Out! dubbed Earl Scruggs “the undisputed master of Bluegrass music.” That Monroe’s is a household name among roots-oriented country fans speaks to his endless touring, recording, and self-promotion, helped along by a battery of fine players.
Fans of bluegrass and old-school country will enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at Monroe’s storied career.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-252-04189-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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