Former Foreign Affairs editor Hyland sends an uninspired valentine to the music of his youth. Despite the subtitle, this is not an all-encompassing history of popular song from 1900 to 1950. Rather, Hyland focuses primarily on five of his favorite composers—Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers—and their lyricists. Beginning with Berlin's work at the turn of the century, he briefly sketches the period's theatrical history, then alternates among his chosen composers, examining their better songs and outlining their professional and personal lives. All of this has been well documented elsewhere, and Hyland draws on the usual sources (Alec Wilder's American Popular Song, not reviewed, and the many fine works of Gerald Bordman, including The American Musical Theatre, 1978) to flesh out his narrative and analyses. He tells once again the familiar stories of how Hammerstein and Kern's Show Boat and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! transformed the musical theater, relying on readily available published sources rather than any new research. Hyland brings no radical new thoughts to the table, and pop-song aficionados are likely to be familiar with most of the lore he recounts, so it's hard to say what purpose his overview might serve. Furthermore, the book virtually ignores the lasting contributions to popular music made by black composers and performers. Hyland's history of ragtime focuses on Irving Berlin and his famous pseudo-ragtime song, ``Alexander's Ragtime Band,'' while he spends a paltry three paragraphs discussing the contributions of Scott Joplin, and he barely acknowledges the fine popular songs of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Eubie Blake, to name just a few. A trip down memory lane that turns out to be a critical dead end.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508611-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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