Aciman’s elegant pieces recall the leisurely, reflective essays of Walter Benjamin and Michel Butor, like them evoking a...
Essays on exile, dislocation, and nostalgia by a noted traveler and memoirist.
Aciman (Out of Egypt, 1994) was born into a family of Jewish, Italian, and Turkish origins in Alexandria, Egypt. The memory of that “part-Victorian, half-decayed” outpost of the British Empire, from which most of the European Jewish population fled following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Nasserite nationalism, haunts these meditations on rootlessness. Aciman’s prose is often characterized by exquisitely rendered pangs of homesickness, and it wanders along that edge between anger and nostalgia that is the exile’s true domain. “No Mediterranean,” he writes, “can stand looking at the tiny lights speckling the New Jersey cliffs at night and not remember a galaxy of little fishing boats that go out to sea at night, dotting the water with their tiny lights till dawn.” But many of his essays are also celebratory; they praise the cities of exile—Rome, Paris, and especially New York—as places of possibility where Aciman could find “a marchand de tabacs who would sell me cigarettes without asking questions” or a sunny park bench on which to pass the time of day without being bothered for an identity card or an explanation. Although Aciman occasionally drifts into journalistic travelogue, more often he offers thoughtful, highly original aperçus through which run several themes: the meaning of the Passover seder and its remembrance of flight, the pleasures of city life and of discovering a city’s forgotten past, and the difficulty of maintaining connections and memories across time and oceans.
Aciman’s elegant pieces recall the leisurely, reflective essays of Walter Benjamin and Michel Butor, like them evoking a world that has disappeared.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-29978-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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