Too-short yet informative and often astute essays on some of the biggest moments in Western music.
Fortune favors the bold, but sometimes the rewards come only later, as this book on musical pioneers reaffirms.
Unlike his previous book, When the World Stopped To Listen, which focused only on American pianist Van Cliburn, Isacoff’s latest describes many moments in music history that “ushered in a new direction—often unexpected, like a planet following an invisible orrery, discernible only after the fact.” Those moments sometimes were met with hostility, as when Carnegie Hall audiences reacted violently to Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” in 1973, with one attendee shouting in response to the electric organs and relentless maraca accompaniment, “All right, I confess!” In erudite if truncated chapters, Isacoff covers dozens of landmarks in Western music: 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo, who invented “a staff of four lines, unlike the five lines used today, on which musical note symbols were placed”; 12th-century composers Léonin & Pérotin, who were key to the development of polyphonic techniques; the birth of opera, which “delivered flamboyant spectacle, enticing music, and engaging theater”; the pioneers of jazz, “perhaps the most important development in the modern era—America’s musical gift to the world”; and the influence of Juilliard dropout Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, the 1959 “recording that turned the jazz world upside down.” The narrative is randomly organized, but Isacoff’s encyclopedic knowledge of music is still very much in evidence. The book is an excellent choice for readers who want a quick survey of Western music’s major developments, and it’s filled with memorable tidbits—e.g., that Florentine stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti “was credited with inventing gelato as well as enhancing opera stagecraft” and that Arnold Schoenberg feared the number 13 so much that he misspelled Aaron’s name in his opera “Moses und Aron” to avoid a title with 13 letters.
Too-short yet informative and often astute essays on some of the biggest moments in Western music.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-65863-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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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