A wide-ranging, highly positive assessment of the El Sistema movement, serving as both inspiration and manual for would-be...
In this follow-up to Tunstall’s Changing Lives (2011), which examined the growth of El Sistema in Venezuela, the authors look at the expansion of this artistic-social project around the world.
Activists and artists Tunstall and Booth traveled to 25 countries interviewing directors, teachers, students, and parents involved in more than 100 El Sistema–inspired musical and educational programs to understand how the project’s principles are working in diverse environments “from Kabul to Rio, from Bethlehem to Soweto, from Manila to Manhattan.” Acknowledging that research is not yet available to provide sufficient hard data about the program’s value, the authors give their own assessment of El Sistema’s impact, looking at its challenges and struggles as well as its successes. From its beginnings some 40 years ago in Venezuela, it reached out to children of poverty; in Europe today, it reaches out to children damaged by ethnic segregation and prejudice. The organization’s goal is to create not just musicians, but responsible citizens, and to that end, El Sistema tries to provide children of all skill levels with a musical community where they develop self-discipline, confidence, and cooperative skills. The book contains three main parts: the first is an explanation of what El Sistema is, how it started, and how it has spread; the second is a close look at each of its six core principles; the third is an overview of how it operates in different cultures, the various ways it is funded, and the networking that links its far-flung programs. Profiles and personal stories abound, and material that did not fit into the narrative flow appears throughout in boxed inserts, which is occasionally somewhat unwieldy. Appendices provide specific information on how one can become involved and lend the movement support.
A wide-ranging, highly positive assessment of the El Sistema movement, serving as both inspiration and manual for would-be social activists.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24564-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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