So dry at times that the reader may worry whether rock is truly dead. But an informative depiction of the early sound and...
A slender academic treatment of rock music as a cultural, political, and historical force.
Rock ’n’ roll has a long pedigree, and Altschuler (American Studies/Cornell Univ.) follows its history only partway to its birth in the union of black country blues and hillbilly balladry. Instead, his story begins in the late 1940s and early ’50s, when a few daring “race” artists managed to bring their sound to white teenagers in an era when “the orchestras of Mantovani, Hugo Winterhalter, Percy Faith, and George Cates created mood music for middle-of-the-road mid-lifers, who hummed and sang along in elevators and dental offices.” Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick, and other rock historians have done better than Altschuler in capturing the mood of the revolution that followed, but Altschuler shines when he sets the history of rock in the context of other social trends, particularly the growing civil-rights movement and American advertising’s discovery of adolescents as a market segment. All were calculated to bring down the harrumphing of older social critics, who were legion: the authors of U.S.A. Confidential, who worried that disk jockeys and their audiences were “hopheads. . . . Many others are Reds, left-wingers, or hecklers of social convention”; the poet Langston Hughes, who grumped that rock ’n’ roll “makes a music so basic it’s like the meat cleaver the butcher uses”; even the late-in-the-day editorialists at the New York Times, who harped at the “nightmare of mud and stagnation” that supposedly was Woodstock. Rock ’n’ rollers weren’t the only ones to endure controversy, Altschuler adds, noting that the NAACP turned on Nat King Cole for his political indifference (Cole later became a committed civil-rights activist), and even safe-as-milk Pat Boone was once suspected of harboring hophead thoughts. Rock ’n’ roll carried the day against all its critics, though, to become whatever it is now, capable of exciting puritan and prurient emotions alike.
So dry at times that the reader may worry whether rock is truly dead. But an informative depiction of the early sound and fury all the same.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-513943-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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 Yorkerstaff 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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