Awfully long for all but the most committed tap fanatics, but an intelligent, thoughtful assessment worth dipping into by...
New York Times dance critic Seibert debuts with an exhaustive account of tap, from its roots in African dance to its multicultural apotheosis.
In early chapters, the author delves into the transfer of rhythm from drums, forbidden as possible instruments of rebellious slave communications, to slapping feet, making the point that sound and rhythm were the essence of this African-American art form. Casual readers may weary in the long introductory section about minstrelsy, but it’s here that Seibert cogently lays out his central themes of assimilation and appropriation, asking as he surveys pioneers like Master Juba how much they catered to white folks, how much instructed them. As tap moved onto Broadway and into the movies, the vexed question for artists was how much pandering was required to gain commercial acceptance. The author appreciates the contributions made by Irish traditions and white innovators like Fred Astaire, who brought black tap with his distinctive adaptations to a mainstream audience. But he reminds us of the many brilliant tappers like the Nicholas Brothers and John Bubbles, sidelined into specialty numbers while commendable but less-extraordinary talents like Eleanor Powell and Ann Miller became stars. The African-American tradition, kept alive at places like the Hoofers’ Club in Harlem and through the devoted efforts of white women like Brenda Bufalino, finally got its due in the tap revival of the 1990s, when youthful veteran Gregory Hines made the old ways new again. In 1995, Savion Glover took tap in a whole new direction with the angry, rap-inflected Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk. The text comes close to turning into a parade of names, but Seibert’s point of view and analytic skills are evident throughout. He acknowledges Glover’s genius, for example, while taking to task his purist posturing and celebrating tap as a typically multicultural American art form, born from black culture but amended and extended by all who loved it.
Awfully long for all but the most committed tap fanatics, but an intelligent, thoughtful assessment worth dipping into by anyone interested in American culture.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86547-953-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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