In New York, Mexico, Berkeley, and around the Mediterranean, in spurts between 1952 and 1962, Howler Ginsberg filled eighteen notebooks with poems, recorded and fabricated dreams, notes on visits and conversations, political ravings, and metaphysical ponders: "This lone/scribble in the margin of my days." From that bulk of scrawl, editor Ball has chosen the passages of "greatest general or literary interest" and furnishes footnotes to elucidate the references to books, movies, and the crowd of writers with whom Ginsberg shared peyote, philosophy, and feverish talk—William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Carl Solomon, Peter Orlovsky. Much of the prose is as telegraphic and leap-frogging as the poetry, though it sometimes settles down to business ("My first novel will be a local work—Paterson Revisited. . ." "Nathaniel West wrote true surrealist novels—must read the sources, Cocteau") or reduces itself to elastic one-liners: "Timelessness seen as infinite extensiveness of one moment's room." But the expected Ginsberg themes dominate—anti-establishment rage, drug-enflamed struggles between "phantasy" and the "real sensation"—and the churning mixture of real names and places with Ginsbergian imaginings should satisfy both underground scholars and those harboring a bizarre nostalgia for a singular milieu. "I think I'll be unamerican a few minutes/See how it feels like—eek!
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1977
ISBN: 0802133479
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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