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BILL MONROE

Name: BILL MONROE
Author: Tom Ewing
ISBN: 978-0-252-04189-1

THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF THE BLUE GRASS MAN

by Tom Ewing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2018

Fans of bluegrass and old-school country will enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at Monroe’s storied career.

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A band mate recalls the life of Bill Monroe (1911-1996), perhaps the best-known popularizer of bluegrass in American musical history.

Guitar, mandolin, banjo, stand-up bass, and a high-lonesome yowl: Those are the classic elements of bluegrass, codified by the man from Kentucky. As so often happened, that highly stylized variant of country music was the product of the big city, courtesy of a Chicago-based radio program that propelled Monroe to early fame. Ewing (editor: The Bill Monroe Reader, 2000), who played guitar with Monroe for a decade, serves up a cognoscenti’s deep-dish version of bluegrass history that is not for the uninitiated: He writes in a typical passage of an influential forerunner of Monroe’s “who owned and played a snakehead A-4 (but who usually picked a mandola or tenor banjo) and whose musicianship and style had a definite impact on Bill.” If you don’t know that a Snakehead A-4 was a kind of mandolin made by Gibson in the 1920s, then you’ll be forgiven for being a little lost—but this is the kind of book whose readers will have command over the bluegrass arsenal. Without saying as much, the author shows how Monroe pioneered the festival circuit, jump-starting the famed Brown County Jamboree in Indiana. Though a purist in many ways, Monroe was also a pioneer of modern technology, perhaps the first major bluegrass musician to record digitally (“you can do several takes in a row and combine the best parts of each performance later,” explained his producer). Ewing also offers casual, unlabored portraits of other key players in the bluegrass scene who admired one another while nursing deeply competitive streaks, as when Monroe expressed some pique when the music magazine Sing Out! dubbed Earl Scruggs “the undisputed master of Bluegrass music.” That Monroe’s is a household name among roots-oriented country fans speaks to his endless touring, recording, and self-promotion, helped along by a battery of fine players.

Fans of bluegrass and old-school country will enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at Monroe’s storied career.

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-252-04189-1

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Univ. of Illinois

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SPIRITUALITY OF AWE
by Kirk J. Schneider illustrated by Tom Ewing

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.