Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
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Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time
Review: Finally got through this after an abortive fist attempt in 2020 (made it 50 pages). The prose is purple, just gushing descriptions of each song, each chord, each performance. Musicological language throughout with no purpose except to confuse and lose the non-musicologist reader. 2/3 of the way through he finally gets down to where… Read more
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Chasing New Horizons
Review: This is exactly how science needs to be communicated to the public. Lots of science for sure, but written so clearly that anyone can understand it easily. I learned so much. And I’m astonished this mission ever got off the drawing board. The number one concern, like all projects is: money, budgets, funding, costs.… Read more
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Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp
Review: What a little jewel this is. Just a lucky find on Amazon based on my previous browsing. From memory, without access to the books, this remarkable Polish officer delivered a series of erudite and passionate lectures on Proust and his great novel. While locked up in a Soviet P.O.W. camp that was deplorably bad… Read more
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If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
Review: Without doubt one of the most peculiar and yet most enjoyable books I have ever encountered. To describe it is difficult. A man starts to read a new novel and finds it cuts off after the first chapter. So he goes back to the shop to complain and meets a woman who had the… Read more
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Opera Anecdotes
Review: Excellent selection of opera anecdotes from Monteverdi to Britten, and from Aida to Zerlina. I read this a few pages at a time, daily, while taking a shit. I shit a lot, so I like to make use of the time. Now I’m flushed with success. Most, almost all of these anecdotes never happened,… Read more
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Riders on the Storm
Review: I ordered this book with zero pre-conceptions and zero knowledge of The Doors. Okay, fractional knowledge. Like I had heard of them, and I had heard the main singles, and I knew Jim Morrison was their singer and that he died. Other than that, not much. This was written by the drummer, and is… Read more
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Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Review: DNF. After a month I’m on page 423 of 770 and I’m tappin’ out. Great read, but so dense and scholarly. Wagner, Wagner everywhere, but not a drop to think. Essentially the author finds Wagner and Wagner references everywhere: because he’s looking for them. Learned a lot, and a fabulous reference for me Too… Read more
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A Farewell to Arms
Review: Fuck am I stoned. Right off me tits. This was an excellent book. Intense prose in a jerky, staccato delivery. The action moves very quickly but then stalls and dies in Book V. There’s denouement and denou-disappointment, which this was. Illustrates the futility of war and armies especially in the Great War. If you… Read more
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Review: Surrounded by a thick foliage of cedars, your house stands, pregnant with autumn. A wonderful, unique little volume. Part travel diary, part poetry, it describes the wanderings of a 17th century Japanese poet named Matsuo Basho. The main narrative is prose and breaks into haiku or linked verse when appropriate. Not a flaw there… Read more
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Vanity Fair
Review: Too long. Way too fucking long.1 Some good prose, but comic opera characters with no basis in reality. Made it 70% of the way through then skipped every two chapters. Missed nothing. Jos Sedley dies at the end. Nobody cares. Published in serial form in 19 monthly installments. No wonder it is so long:… Read more