An artfully crafted reminder that, at its best, jazz was and is as much a cultural mode as a musical genre.
Clear, sophisticated exploration of jazz’s most musically potent pairing.
Griffin (Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.; Who Set You Flowin?, 1995, etc.) and saxophonist/composer Washington (Music/Brooklyn Coll.) pull readers into the world of Miles Davis and John Coltrane during their collaborations between 1955 and 1960, addressing the prescient dialogue their music engaged with the African-American experience and American culture as a whole. The authors bring the music to life with clarity, passion and detail, rarely straying into hyperbole or undue superlative. Largely avoiding technical pedantry or dull description, they put forth a cogent synthesis of musicological and cultural analysis. They offer admirably complete individual discussions of Davis’s and Coltrane’s personal histories to contextualize this historically unique musical partnership. The focus at times skews more toward Davis, whose public and private personality became part of celebrity culture in a way that cult-figure Coltrane never would. Indeed, the book’s greatest strengths emerge during the authors’ close study of Davis. Griffin and Washington’s sonic definition of “cool” embraces not only the trumpeter’s highly individualized musical sound, but his personal style, behavior and performance mannerisms as well. Fresh hearings of Kind of Blue and Milestones would assist readers with some of the more specific musical discussions.
An artfully crafted reminder that, at its best, jazz was and is as much a cultural mode as a musical genre.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-32785-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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