Capote’s about due for a revival. This is the sampler to spark it.
“I’d never known anyone who wrote,” Capote once remarked of his small-town Southern childhood, the start of many a story. “Indeed, I knew few people who read.”
He has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century, and Capote would be chagrined to find that, yes, few people read, and fewer read him now than in his heyday, despite two recent films devoted to his life circa In Cold Blood. This well-made selection of essays, excerpts and interviews memorializes the Capote who was at once more and less than the careerist literary journalist of that era—the bon vivant who fed himself baked potatoes stuffed with caviar; the haunted romantic who declared that the most beautiful word and the most dangerous word in English were one and the same: love. He was also the gossip, social butterfly and hanger-on who did not like actors (of John Gielgud: “all his brains are in his voice”; of Marlon Brando: “No actor . . . has transported intellectual falsity to higher levels of hilarious pretension”) or politicians except, strangely, Ronald Reagan and Adlai Stevenson, but who always managed to be around actors and politicians. Capote is largely remembered today as a personality, a celebrity and Tonight Show fixture, but he was a brilliant writer first and always. This anthology gathers many pieces that stand up well against anyone’s work, as with his description of a New York heat wave or of the tony-crowd, pre-jetset life on a Mediterranean island (“Ischia was no place for the rush of hours, islands never are”). The best parts find Capote at his most relaxed, inclined to make fun of his many peculiarities, especially when they butt up against others’ eccentricities. Capote’s account of a chicken dinner with a famed artist gone awry is one of the funniest pieces in the culinary literature and a pleasure in any context.
Capote’s about due for a revival. This is the sampler to spark it.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6661-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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