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Book Rate: August 1, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: August 1, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Robert
Birnbaum
Books covered this week include:
The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul
of American Music by Dunstan Prial
100 Ways America is Screwing Up the
World by John Tirman
American Heritage Dictionary: 4th Edition
Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris
by Frances Morris
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Gallatin Canyon by
Tom McGuane
Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews
by Jonathan Cott
The
Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music
by Dunstan Prial (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages)
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The legendary John Hammond, who discovered, championed and produced
Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman, Bob
Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan,
is obviously a great story, though it’s not clear to me that
AP business reporter Dunsten Prial is the guy to do it. On the other
hand Ken Emerson, no slouch and author of an invaluable tome on
the Brill Building, Always Music in The Air, thinks so,
“John Hammond must be grinning in his grave, because Dunstan
Prial has brought back to life for 21st-century readers the man
who animated much of the 20th century's greatest music. The
Producer does justice not only to Hammond's legendary role
in instigating and integrating American music, but also to his indefatigable
efforts on behalf of civil rights and labor unions. To read this
book is to bask, once again, in Hammond's toothy smile and marvel
at his enthusiasm and insight."
-Robert Birnbaum
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100
Ways America is Screwing Up the World
by John Tirman w/ foreword by Howard Zinn (HarperCollins
Perennial, 288 pages)
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George W. Bush, Wal-Mart, Halliburton, gangsta rap, and SUVs have
in common that they're all among the hundred ways in which America
is screwing up the world, according to executive director of MIT's
Center for International Studies John Tirman. The USA responsible
for many, if not most, of the twentieth century's most important
scientific and technological advancements now demonizes its scientists
and thinkers in the twenty-first, while moronizing its youth with
anti-Darwin/pro-"Intelligent Design" propaganda. The beacon
of personal freedoms for over 200 years now supports torture and
illegal wiretapping—spreading its principles and policies
at gunpoint while ruthlessly bombing the world with Big Macs and
Mickey Mouse ears. 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World
is a quick and amusing look-see into where we've gone wrong—from
the destruction of the environment to the promotion of abhorrent
personal health and eating habits to the "wussification"
of the free press—an alternately admonishing and amusing call
to arms for patriotic Blue America. The bonus here is, of course,
a brief forward by Howard Zinn, though there's nothing here Howard
hasn't said before. John Tirmin is the author, or coauthor and editor,
of nine books on international affairs, including Empty Promise:
The Growing Case Against Star Wars, Making the Money Sing,
The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11, and
his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington
Post, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal,
and the International Herald Tribune. He lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
-Robert Birnbaum
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American
Heritage Dictionary: Fourth edition with CD ROM
(Houghton Mifflin, 2112 pages)
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Probably the population of people who get excited about a new edition
of a dictionary is smaller than Dubuque, Iowa, let’s say.
And though spelling bees seem to be gaining in popularity on WFW,
it hasn't yet reached smack-down improportions. No one can say we
are not having fun, though, and even the most recondite scholars
should welcome the news of AHD IV with joyous outpouring of glee
and whatever recondite scholars do for fun. There are, of course,
the new words admitted to this lexicographical inner: Amber Alert,
blogosphere, google, gravitino, halo effect, hawala, lycopene, malware,
micropolis, proteome, Qi Gong, SARS, shout-out, speed dating, sudoku,
Texas hold’em, text message, and wiki. And you may purchase
a fully loadable Windows / Mac CD version—which includes the
entire text of the updated edition, 68,000 audio pronunciations,
1,000 full-color photographs and illustrations, and a college-level
thesaurus with more than 260,000 synonyms and has spell-check capability.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Henri
Rousseau: Jungles in Paris
by Frances Morris with essays by Christopher Green, Nancy
Ireson, Claire Frèches-Thory and Vincent Gillet (Harry Abrams
/National Gallery of Art, 230 pages)
I’m not sure about my grasp or appreciation of painter Henri
Rousseau, thus my interest in this catalogue accompanying the National
Gallery of Arts’s exhibition which runs through Oct 15,
2006. The catalogue includes essays by Green, a senior curator at
Tate Modern, Morris Ireson, a doctoral research student at the Courtauld
Institute, Gille Frèches-Thory, as well as Pascal Rousseau,
University of Lausanne. Both the exhibition and catalogue extensively
display more than 100 documents, popular ephemera, and a wide range
of source materials highlighting Rousseau’s ambitions, methods,
and his cultural milieu. The exhibition had been on view at Tate
Modern, which organized it, November 3, 2005 through February 5,
2006, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, March 15 through
June 19, 2006.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Special
Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl (Viking, 514 pages)
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Columbia University alumnus Marisha Pessl debuts with an ambitious
novel that her publisher describes as “combining the suspense
of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling
gifts of Donna Tartt, a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl's
own.” The story in brief: Raised in academia its heroine,
Blue van Meer, is clever, deadpan, and a cineaste and possessed
of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific
knowledge. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual)
St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with
a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah
Schneider. One of Hannah's friends drowns and then the shocking
death of Hannah herself leads to a confluence of mysteries which
Blue is left to make sense of with only her gimlet-eyed instincts
and cultural references to lean on. The novel is structured around
a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class and contains ironic
visual aids drawn by Pessl.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Gallatin
Canyon
by Tom McGuane (Knopf, 228 pages)
Here is a link to my remarks
at the Denver Post on Tom
McGuane's new story collection which if you have had even the
most incidental contact with me of late you would know I am much
delighted by. Oddly the book cites the New
Yorker as the venue for only two of these stories when,
in fact, five appeared there. This I speculate was a misdirection
concocted to keep penurious readers from consuming half a book without
buying it. Also, I find it puzzling but pleasing that the editors
who respond to their emails run the finer book sections. Oscar
Villalon, Tom
Walker, and David
Ullow week in and out produce interesting and serviceable sections
while the rude flying monkeys at the Boston Globe and the
New York Times, ach, well, enough said.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Bob
Dylan: The Essential Interviews
edited by Jonathan Cott (Wenner Books, 320 pages)
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Well—having grown up with Dylan's music as the soundtrack
to my young, rebellious adulthood and watched him as he has grown
up and seen him bleating like an old goat on the Grammies, he continues
to be a fascinating sphinx-like figure standing in sharp relief
against the garish super troopers of celebrity culture. Of course,
I also remember Straight Arrow Books, Jann Wenner’s first
publishing venture, from the years when one received a roach clip
with a subscription to Rolling Stone. Now this volume,
which contains thirty-one interviews conducted with Dylan by among
others, Studs Terkel, Mikhail Gilmore, Robert Hilbrun, Ron Rosenbaum,
Kurt Loder, Robert Shelton, Nora Ephron, Nat Hentoff, and big cheese
Jann Wenner. Janet Maslin hyperboles, “In an irresistible
new anthology edited by Jonathan Cott, one of the original editors
of Rolling Stone and arguably the most simpatico writer
ever to converse with Mr. Dylan, the interview format remains eminently
readable through more than 400 pages. And it yields far more than
an extended conversation. The mosaic of discussions found here is
many things: biography, oral history, culture time capsule, music
lesson and psychodrama.” Yeah right.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Want more? See last week's reviews
(actually from a few weeks ago--we got lazy).
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