The collection’s promising evocation of “communication and disconnection” leads to more repetition than illumination.
A collection of interconnected personal essays on the way musical favorites connect and disconnect us.
This isn’t the first recent book to make connections between seemingly disparate recordings or to have a playlist introducing each essay. Yet it is a book that could only have been written by Greenman, a novelist (The Slippage, 2013, etc.) who has also collaborated on memoirs by visionary musicians Questlove and George Clinton. Nobody else could connect the same songs to the same experiences that the author has, and one of the underlying themes is that one’s relationship with music is as deeply personal as any of one’s other relationships. In most of these essays, Greenman focuses on those other relationships, offering the music as the reader’s internal soundtrack and sometimes barely alluding to some of the songs listed. This approach works best if the readers are familiar with those songs, or willing to seek them out, for the author’s taste is eclectic and his experience deep. They are also essays by a writer writing about language who recognizes that “language has limits, particularly when it is charged with expressing complex emotions,” so that “songs seemed like a better way to go. They have one foot in language, but that foot is tapping.” Yet most of the thematic connections he makes among songs rely mainly on lyrics (the tapping foot is harder to articulate), and many of the essays seem to follow a similar template. They are about relationships with a friend, past or present, and readers soon realize that almost all of these friends are women—and that the boundaries between such friendship and the desire for something more almost always have blurred, at one point, at least for the author. Often, one friend or the other, or both, wants something that the other can’t give her or him, and musical resonance doesn’t necessarily deepen with the passage of time or pages.
The collection’s promising evocation of “communication and disconnection” leads to more repetition than illumination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3498-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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