A welcome history of an overlooked milieu, one that provides ample inspiration for art makers today.
A carefully constructed history of how Athens, Georgia, became a cultural hot spot.
Everyone’s heard of R.E.M. These days, fewer are familiar with the B-52’s, and almost no one outside the musical cognoscenti knows the Flat Duo Jets and Pylon. All of these bands, writes Hale (American Studies and History/Univ. of Virginia; A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America, 2011, etc.), were ingredients in the cultural stew in which she grew up. The author combines her insider’s perspective with her academic skills, creating a book that is scholarly without being arid, popular without being condescending—a pleasing mix, as were the sounds produced by Athens bands from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. During that period, Hale writes, “the Athens scene produced amazingly good music…but the scene also transformed the punk idea that anyone could start a band into the even more radical idea that people in unlikely places could make a new culture and imagine new ways of thinking about the meaning of the good life and the ties that bind humans to each other.” It wasn’t just bands: The hipster/hippie/bohemian set neatly interacted (and often shared memberships) with the gay community, drawing like-minded people in from the surrounding countryside and outstripping larger cities such as Charleston and Atlanta in building a community in which writers, painters, musicians, poets, and scholars wandered between media and genres. Not much has changed, writes the author. In Athens today, “the currency remains DIY culture,” with primacy placed on the homemade rather than the appropriated. Many of Hale’s cases are happy ones, but some end tragically—e.g., Vic Chesnutt, for whom the Athens scene “worked pretty well…until it didn’t,” whereupon, ever on the verge of fame, he killed himself. He would doubtless be pleased to be included among the many “outcasts or weirdos” whom Hale respectfully recounts. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A welcome history of an overlooked milieu, one that provides ample inspiration for art makers today.Pub Date: March 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4696-5487-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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