Like fine banquet fare: Some items to be wolfed down, some savored slowly, some best stored in the fridge for a later day.
Erudite, occasionally curmudgeonly collection of reviews and ruminations by award-winning memoirist Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, 2006, etc.).
Most of these recent pieces first appeared in the New York Review of Books, whose generous space allotments give the author sufficient latitude to explore texts and performances in expansive, illuminating ways. Reviewing a staging of Euripides’s The Children of Herakles, Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.) is able to elucidate the play’s historical context and the author’s biography as well as to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the design, direction and acting. He can thus display—and his readers benefit from—his potent critical tools: his vast knowledge, particularly of classical antiquity; his comprehensive reading; his remarkable capacity to see the tangled connections invisible to the less learned. Each review gives a mini-seminar on history, literature, biography and the arts. His interests range widely. He intelligently covers films about 9/11, Alexander the Great, the Trojan War and Virginia Woolf, cattily calling Nicole Kidman in The Hours “pretty without being beautiful.” He critiques productions of plays by Harold Pinter, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde (who pops up continually) and Tennessee Williams (who gave Mendelsohn his title). He assesses Thucydides’ Histories of the Peloponnesian War and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Few critics can be more illuminating—and few more dismissive. Read consecutively, Mendelsohn’s essays begin to grate. He frequently implies that he alone gets what others manifestly failed to get. Sliced by his critical knife are some of his best-known colleagues, from Frank Rich and David Denby to unnamed others who gush and coo, avers the author, over trash, sentimentality and mistakes.
Like fine banquet fare: Some items to be wolfed down, some savored slowly, some best stored in the fridge for a later day.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-145643-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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