This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.
A veteran novelist and nonfiction writer offers a Southerner’s take on country music’s poet laureate.
Hemphill, author of The Nashville Sound, an early look at the country music industry, and a number of other works with a Southern perspective, arrives decidedly late at the Hank Williams biography party. It’s difficult to imagine anyone improving on Colin Escott’s award-winning, meticulously researched 1994 work on Williams, revised last year; the Canadian writer, who won a Grammy as co-producer of a set of Williams’s complete recordings, added to the literature with Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway (with Kira Florita, 2001) and his work on the 2004 PBS documentary about the country singer. Hemphill acknowledges Escott’s scholarship in his own unscholarly book, which offers the barest outline of Williams’s brief, tortured career. That outline is familiar to any Williams fan: his hardscrabble Alabama upbringing; the meteoric success of his simple, cuttingly affecting songs; his slug-it-out relationship with first wife, Audrey; his drug- and drink-plagued stardom; and his precipitous decline, including his sideshow-like marriage to second spouse, Billie; and his sudden death at 29 as 1953 dawned. There’s no deep new research here—the most talkative sources appear to be Williams’s steel guitarist Don Helms and Charles Carr, who chauffeured the musician on the night he died. Hemphill, a fellow Alabamian, takes the tack that Hank was a good ol’ boy just like Hemphill’s father, a long-distance trucker who liked to pound out Williams’s songs on the piano. The writer splashes plenty of local color on his canvas, especially in passages about Williams’s barnstorming early days. But he never reveals anything essential about his subject as an artist or as a suffering human being; worse, he never explains how or why so distinctly Southern a musician achieved such universality in his lifetime, on his own and in covers of his songs by such unlikely performers as Tony Bennett.
This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03414-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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