A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.
The noted record producer, sound engineer, and musicologist surveys the many sounds the world has to offer.
The title is from Paul Simon, whom Boyd, author of White Bicycles, met back in the 1960s when Simon was in the process of making a Martin Carthy treatment of the old folksong “Scarborough Fair” his own. But borrowing is the nature of the game, and musicians are often a step behind the times. Even as Simon, enamored of Zulu music, was recording Graceland, “on home ground, world music’s biggest sellers—Le Mystère des Voix Bulgaires, Buena Vista Social Club, Ladysmith Black Mambazo—were considered old-fashioned, even reactionary.” The kids, in other words, weren’t listening. Instead, hip-hop reigns in Ghana, the Rolling Stones in Rio, and heavy metal in Hungary—though Boyd adds, “even the hardest-core Hungarian heavy metal headbanger will acknowledge a fondness for Muzsikás, Márta, and táncház,” traditional sounds that world music–loving hipsters began to eat up courtesy of Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and other explorers. Boyd’s leanings are catholic, his enthusiasms varied, and he engagingly explores how Ry Cooder gathered the traditional Cuban musicians who made up Buena Vista, Herb Alpert scrapped light jazz for mariachi, and so on. Readers should prepare for a flood of disparate data that adds up to something more than trivia: Argentine bassist Leopoldo Thompson “may have been the first anywhere to deliver percussive slaps to this normally bowed instrument”; Elvis Presley was crazy for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and thus “Dean Martin’s Italianate crooning is all over Elvis’s vocal style”; “Wimoweh” owes its title to “Pete Seeger’s mishearing of uyimbube”; and much more. It’s marvelous, sometimes careening adventure, as Boyd darts from one musical obsession to another.
A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988670025
Page Count: 760
Publisher: ZE Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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