The electric guitar changed the world, and Tolinski and di Perna impressively reveal its epic story.
Two music writers explore the history of one of the most iconic instruments of the past 100 years.
The many connoisseurs of the electric guitar are inclined to argue over who put the ax into the hands of so many hewers. Former Guitar World editor-in-chief Tolinski (Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, 2012, etc.) and longtime Guitar World and Guitar Aficionado contributor di Perna (Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits, 2012, etc.) push the usual chronologies back into the 1920s, locating its birthplace in Hollywood, its principal author a Texas refugee named George Delmetia Beauchamp. Shrewdly, the authors note that at the very outset there were plenty of collaborators, tinkers, and improvers. If Beauchamp “invented the first fully functional guitar pickup,” then Slovak immigrant John Dopyera had much to do with the first functional resonator, as did Swiss immigrant Adolph Rickenbacker. The point is, as ever, that the guitar was an accretion of inventions by a small army of inventors, almost none of them born in the countries where they made their inventions. The authors trace the evolution of the guitar nicely up to the present, writing knowledgeably of the merits and demerits of Japanese knockoffs, Pete Townshend–inspired amp stacks, and the contributions of mad-dog collectors to the whole rock ’n’ roll genre: if Joe Walsh hadn’t had an extra Les Paul on hand, then Jimmy Page might have played a Stratocaster, and the whole Led Zeppelin thing would have gone down much differently. Some of these stories are well-worn, but the authors are geeky enough to bring freshness to chestnuts through technical nuggets aplenty. Sure, the Beatles and the Stones had their fans and detractors, but their guitar sounds and rigs were different, and in any event, “the British Invasion was to guitar music roughly what the Gutenberg Bible and advent of printing had been to literacy.”
The electric guitar changed the world, and Tolinski and di Perna impressively reveal its epic story.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54099-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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