A well-informed but tepid history.
An overview of how the spoken word has been captured on records, tapes, cassettes, and digital devices.
For Rubery (English/Queen Mary Univ.; The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News, 2009, etc.), the audiobook poses two overarching questions: “What difference does it make whether we read a book or listen to it?” Does the printed book have “privileged standing” over a recording? Although it would seem that audiobooks would be an uncontroversial boon to people with vision impairment or busy lives, throughout its 150-year history, recorded books have generated heated debate: some people claim that listening is not as intellectually challenging as reading print; others disagree. Audiobooks attract nonreaders and those who love to read. “Audiobooks fascinate me,” the author writes, “precisely because they elicit such intense feelings among readers and appeal to groups that seem to be polar opposites when it comes to taste.” Although Rubery carefully chronicles the technology, marketing, and public response to recorded books, his fascination rarely infuses his narrative with excitement. The technology that began in 1877 when Thomas Edison recorded his recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” took off in the 1930s, in America and Britain, with an effort to supply books for blind readers, including World War I soldiers. Those readers, grateful as they were, disagreed about whether books should be narrated dramatically or in a straightforward manner. The American Foundation for the Blind claimed that the presentation influenced the acceptance of the talking book “as a legitimate alternative to print.” Controversy also erupted about what books were appropriate for recording and how to deal with pornography or offensive language. Some authors—e.g., Willa Cather and Rudyard Kipling—refused permission for their books to be recorded, objecting that any narrator would impose an interpretation that should be left up to readers. Rubery’s account of the founding of Caedmon, a company devoted to recording famous authors reading their works, is one of the livelier chapters.
A well-informed but tepid history.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-54544-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
