Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.
Novelist and travel writer Iyer (The Global Soul, 2000, etc.) visits and attempts to comprehend some of the most remote, romantic, impoverished, and/or legendary places on the globe.
The author’s own biography is about as international as it can be: born in London to Indian parents, he now lives in Japan and regularly visits his mother in California. He focuses here on contrast, irony, and mystery, arranging 17 pieces in three loose thematic groups—although they probably could have been grouped randomly to the same effect. His venues shift from mountaintops in California, Tibet, and Haiti to the impoverished streets of the Philippines and Cambodia, to Oman and Easter Island, where he greeted the millennium with his mother and tried to find a computer that could send his e-mail. Iyer is a master of the ironic detail, and in these pieces he is able to notice the very objects whose juxtaposition will nail shut the lid of his beautifully constructed metaphorical box. In a 1993 account of New Year’s in Ethiopia, for example, after noting the country’s dangers, he concludes with a quotation from a guidebook about the “champagne atmosphere” of Addis Ababa. The author excels as well at what might be called “snapshot exposition”: the ability to capture in a few swift images the entire milieu in which he finds himself. There are a few portraits of people (the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen), several pieces that seem to be primarily book reviews (including a sensitive and imaginative analysis of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans), and some fairly traditional there-I-went-and-this-is-what-I-saw-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel narratives. Occasionally, the author fails to avoid the travel writer’s arrogance, as when he tells how other tourists don’t appreciate what he does. Such lapses are rare; slightly more frequent is a tone of sadness akin to despair.
Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41506-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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