Monday, March 18, 2024

Book Review: Delish Insane Sweets by Joanna Saltz

Delish Insane Sweets
by Joanna Saltz (641.865 Sal)

By now everyone is sick to death of their healthy diets and it’s time to splurge on desserts!

 

Delish Insane Sweets is a collection of dessert recipes on the smaller size. Some recipes will make 13 cookies (Ultimate Snickerdoodles), some 18 (Earth Day Cookies), and some 24 (Owl Cupcakes — which are adorable looking, too).

 

The categories include Cookie Monsters, Cupcakes, Brownies, Bar Cookies, and Holiday Cookies.

 

Pick and choose a treat, and if you don’t like that recipe, the batch was small enough that you can give them all away to neighbors or coworkers and try something else without feeling like you wasted a ton of ingredients.

 

Use your own chocolate chip cookie recipe and use “31 Amazing Mix-Ins for Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough” to create a few new cookies using a few soft caramels for some, chopped cooked bacon for another, mini Oreos for others, along with 28 other suggestions.

 

This was a fun book to browse through and bake (Mint Chocolate Chip Brownies! Cheesecake-Stuffed Cupcakes!) and I have it on my To Buy List for my personal collection.

 

Best of all, there are photos of every single recipe.

 

( official Joanna Saltz page on the Delish web site )

 

Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Saturday, March 16, 2024

DVD/TV Review: Endeavour complete series

Endeavour series
(DVD Endeavour)

From my first review of Endeavour when it started nine seasons ago: Endeavour follows the early years of policeman-in-training Endeavour Morse as he learns the ins and outs of police work with Investigator Fred Thursday in 1960s Oxford, England. As a fan of the Inspector Morse series with veteran actor John Thaw, I was curious to see how this series would hold up as a “prequel.”

 

Now the final season is over, I decided to go back and watch all of the seasons again from the beginning. One of the things that I liked most about this series is the superb writing and the attention to detail, tying together elements from the original Inspector Morse series and from the books by Colin Dexter. Endeavour Morse, always known as “Morse” to everyone, is a young Oxford-educated young man with a fondness for doing crosswords and solving mysteries, which is why he decided to try his hand at detective work. His knowledge of classical music, opera, Latin, and the classics gives him an edge over the other street-smarts cops that he works with in his division. The acting in this series is superb, with excellent acting by Roger Allam as Chief Inspector Fred Thursday, Anton Lesser as Superintendent Reginald Bright, James Bradshaw as Dr. Max DeBryn and of course, Sean Evans as Morse. One of the things that I would like to recommend is in the bonus features in Series Nine: a documentary about the making of this series and its previous series, Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis. Do watch all of the bonus features as you will learn much more about the making of these marvelous productions. I have to admit that I am sad that this is done now, but the producers did a wonderful job of bringing the stories together.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the original series, Inspector Morse.)

 

(Also available: many of the Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter.)

 

( Internet Movie Database entry for this series )

 

See Kim J.’s original review of Endeavour, in the November 2014 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Kim J.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Friday, March 15, 2024

Music Book Review: Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Secret History by Kristina R. Gaddy

Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History
by Kristina R. Gaddy (Music 787.88 Gad)

The banjo might be the first truly American musical invention. Nowadays, we associate the banjo with country and bluegrass music, where it has continued to proliferate as an important component of those musical styles, but during its history, it’s been used for many kinds of music, and its development coincided with a lot of early American history, too. But it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact date and place of its invention: there are related instruments still in use today in many parts of Africa, though the American iterations of the instrument have their own unique design elements. Learning more about the banjo might help us to learn more about ourselves, too, and Kristina Gaddy’s new book, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Secret History, reveals a lot about both musical developments in early America as well as social issues that have been part of the entire length of our history.

 

Gaddy approaches the subject of the banjo both as a musician and as an historian. Her background as a nonfiction long-form journalist is important to this book, as it digs deeper into the earliest formative days of the banjo than previous scholars have generally published so far — there is a lot of original research here that ultimately pieces together as clear a picture of the beginnings of the banjo as we’re likely to find. But she is a musician herself, and an enthusiast of the banjo. She plays fiddle, and she has even produced a CD of field recordings of banjo player Currance Hammonds. Her partner, Pete Ross, is a luthier who produces elaborate replicas of period banjos, including exacting replicas of some of the earliest known instruments. This fascinating combination of backgrounds keeps Gaddy’s writing about the banjo both thoroughly researched and very enthusiastic.

 

Grammy, Pulitzer and MacArthur-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens provides a short foreword to the book that aptly describes the current state of research into the earliest days of the banjo: “Anybody who studies the banjo knows they are walking into a swamp of unknown players, scraps of primary sources, dead ends, flashes of brilliant understanding and also of utter despair. How is something so integral to American culture so badly understood and so widely misrepresented?” She points out that ceremonial and spiritual aspects of the banjo’s creation haven’t been discussed before, though they are likely essential to the real history of the instrument.


Those scraps of primary sources take interesting forms in the earliest history of the banjo: Gaddy takes over the prelude of the book with a discussion of her and her partner Ross’ searches for new information about the banjo in pre-1820 visual art. For Ross, these early paintings can be important clues for his replicas of early banjos, and for Gaddy, finding some new art that “changed what we knew about the instrument’s origins” led to the deep research that ultimately produced this book. Her immediate observations, which the book delves into in great detail, were that the origin of the banjo might not be as all-American as generally accepted, and that the early banjo was a sacred instrument, rather than a secular musical invention as it’s often discussed.

 

Gaddy traces the earliest appearances of the banjo in print to 1688, in the writings of Hans Sloane, who served as doctor to the governor of Jamaica. While we’ve always known that the banjo was created by early African-American slaves, the history of the instrument — and of the slave trade — go back even earlier than America itself. Sloane wrote of “strum stumps” that he observed being played by enslaved Jamaicans at a festival in 1688, and his descriptions aptly match the distinctive characteristics of the banjo. In particular, his descriptions of instruments that are made “in imitation of lutes” with gourd bodies, flat fingerboards, and tuning pegs point to being early banjos rather than instruments like the gurmi or the akonting from West Africa, because the music made on them features a regular return to high notes. These notes would likely have come from shorter high-pitched strings added to the “strum stumps,” the precursor to the 5th string on a modern banjo. Sloane collected various curiosities throughout the world over the course of his life, and they were eventually donated to Great Britain where they became the beginning of the British Museum. His collection included at least two examples of “strum stumps” that survived into the early 20th Century, but they have unfortunately been lost. Sloane’s accounts are followed by a chapter on the observations of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, who observed similar instruments around 1694 that he described as a “sort of guitar” being used during a dance referred to as the calenda. Gaddy digs deeper into the nature of the calenda dance itself: while Western observers of the era thought of it as mere entertainment, it seems clear that the dance and its accompanying music have spiritual foundations reaching back to the slaves’ homelands in Africa. So the earliest accounts of the banjo seem to indicate that it was developed no so much in America the country, but in the islands of the early Americas.

 

But the story isn’t that simple. In reality, this research, and most of this book, is as much a survey of the history of slavery in the Americas as a story of the banjo. The banjo is fundamentally a product of slavery, an instrument that draws from its creators’ traditions, the practicalities of their new circumstances, and the natural result of cross-cultural exchanges that happen over time, like the Creole and Gullah languages or the Vodou, Santeria, or Obeah religious practices. To trace the bare threads of information left about the early development of the banjo, Gaddy takes us from the Caribbean to the New England states and back again many times. Her writing style is captivating: each chapter generally focuses on the writings of one European or American interacting with slaves, each of these somewhat unreliable narrators contributing their own sighting of a banjo-like instrument, usually as an aside while writing about their broader observations of dance and musical practices of the slaves in their area. Some of these narrators are priests, some public employees, some soldiers, and some slave-owners themselves. And in the midst of their writings, they mention instruments that all lead to the banjo: the Creole-bania, the banger, bonja, bangeo, banza, and so on. When one considers that the inner lives and traditions of slaves are either woefully misunderstood or barely acknowledged at all in many of these primary sources, we’re lucky to have any mentions of the banjo at all! We’re left with a complicated puzzle that will never point to a particular person, date or location, not unlike the stories of most victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

 

Research into the earliest days of the banjo takes up most of the book. Toward the end, we move into the beginnings of the modern banjo around the 1840s. The instruments we’d quickly recognize as banjos now, with drum head tops on wooden hoops, originated around this era, and these were generally the product of white musicians performing in blackface for white audiences at minstrel shows. The banjo had already started to represent Black musical culture through songs written by and for white audiences and distributed as sheet music since roughly the 1820s, but the minstrel shows spread an exaggerated (and often demeaning) interpretation of Black cultural arts around the country. The book doesn’t really get into the history of white musical styles that have subsequently adopted the banjo, but of course there are lots of resources for learning more about the strains of country, blues, folk and bluegrass music for which the banjo has become an iconic instrument. But it’s fair to say that although the styles we associate with banjo playing in the modern era are overwhelmingly created by and for white audiences, the instrument itself, and its early repertoire, are entirely the domain of slaves.

 

There is a final “coda” chapter that addresses the handful of Black contemporary artists who have re-engaged with the banjo. This is a relatively new musical movement that Gaddy traces through the early days of the internet, when the “Black Banjo Then and Now” forum transitioned into hosting the first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005. New generations of black artists are picking up the banjo, combining musical artistry with deep dives into the history of Black music in America. To the extent that the banjo represents the earliest strains of new music in the country, they’re revealing the history of both black music, and American music as a whole.

 

Gaddy has uncovered more of the hidden history of the banjo with this book than any authors before her, but more work remains to be done. Her extensive notes at the end of the book should serve as a great starting point for further research. More answers may turn out to be right in front of our eyes, just not viewed from the proper context of discovery yet, just like the image that was on display in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that Gaddy and Ross happened upon at the beginning of the book.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Lift Every Voice: The History of African-American Music by Burton W. Peretti, Black American Music: Past and Present by Hildred Roach.)

 

( official Kristina R. Gaddy web site )

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!


Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Book Review: The Tree of Life: How a Holocaust Sapling Inspired the World by Eliza Boxer and Alianna Rozentsveig

The Tree of Life: How a Holocaust Sapling Inspired the World
by Elisa Boxer (author) and Alianna Rozentsveig (illutrator) (j 940.531 Box)

This is an attractive little non-fiction historical book for youth readers, done in picture book format, written by Elisa Boxer with illustrations by Alianna Rozentsveig. It tells a story that begins during World War II in the Terezin concentration camp but which has repercussions through today.

 

Jewish teacher Irma Lauscher risked breaking protocols in the camp by asking one of the other prisoner workers to smuggle in a tree sapling, which she could use to give the children in the camp a project to occupy their time. That fellow worker managed to conceal a small maple tree sapling in his boot as he returned to the camp one evening. Irma and her illicit class of students planted the sapling and each child shared part of their meager daily allotment of water to help the small tree flourish.

 

The book details how the tree survived, and its seeds have been shared around the world, to create other trees that are offspring of the original — to show that even during the worst possible hardships, it is possible to keep something alive through love and concerted efforts.

 

This was a moving story, and one I’d never heard about before reading the book. It provides a marvelous introduction to children on a difficult subject. And the art is terrific. Strongly recommended.

 

( official Elisa Boxer web site ) | ( official Alianna Rozentsveig web site )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Books Review: The Vampire Knitting Club series by Nancy Warren

The Vampire Knitting Club series
by Nancy Warren (Hoopla Audiobooks only)

Lucy Swift has inherited her beloved grandmother’s knitting shop in Oxford, England. As a child she would travel from the US to spend her summers there as her parents are world-famous archaeologists and spent their time at various digs around the world. Now trying to get the shop in order, she learns that Grandma is now a vampire! And she lives in the basement with a group of vampires who come out at night to knit in her shop.


This is a fun, cozy mystery series set in contemporary England. You meet the other town folk as well who move in and out of the stories. The library offers all 14 books in this series (the latest came out in 2022), as well as the prequel short story and one short story written for a holiday anthology. In the first three books you are mostly introduced to the vamps who are from various time periods in England and there is a mystery in every book. The vampires range from a snarky teen who only wears black to a 500-year-old landed, educated gentleman to a former silent screen star. I thought the series especially picked up at book four. A member of the library’s Just Desserts mystery book group had suggested this series to the group so I gave this a try and thoroughly enjoy the characters and stories. Sarah Zimmerman is the narrator and does an excellent job of voicing each character.


The library offers this series only on Hoopla audio. I recommend you search for “vampire knitting club boxed set.” You’ll get three books per set and will be able to listen to the first nine books in the series while using only three of your four monthly Hoopla downloads. After that, search by title. There is also an off-shoot series, Vampire Knitting Club: Cornwall.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Aunt Dimity by Nancy Atherton.)

 

( official Nancy Warren web site )

 

Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Monday, March 11, 2024

Books Review: The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Core Rule Books: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual

The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Core Rule Books: Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual
by various authors/editors (all 793.93 Dun)

The very first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) came out in primitive form in 1974. I first started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) with a small group of friends in 1981, using what is now known as 1st Edition rules — the first “core rulebooks” were released between 1977 and 1979. My group’s “campaign” world grew in size and complexity, and my group of players played together until around 2003, with new players joining and old players dropping out…until we all eventually drifted away from the game due to time constraints related to families and jobs. But even when we were still actively playing, we had decided not to embrace the 2nd (1989) and 3rd (2000) Editions of the core rule books.

 

Now, over 20 years later, the opportunity to lead a new group, comprised mainly of players who are new to the game, has lately had me refreshing my knowledge of the current rules and mechanics of how the game is played. Dungeons & Dragons is currently using 5th Edition rulebooks, and much has changed since the 1st Edition version of the game I played back in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the changes are aimed at streamlining gameplay and giving players more variety in the choices of characters they can create.

 

The three core rule books remain the same though — the Player’s Handbook gives new (and veteran) players the basics of what they need to know about creating original characters and how to play the game; the Dungeon Master’s Guide is designed for the person who is going to run the game, giving them far more information than the basic Players need, including more rule explanations, tables and charts, and suggestions on how to design a game campaign or an entire world. And the Monster Manual is an encyclopedia of all the creatures (mostly magical or imaginary) that the Players may encounter in their various adventures, with detailed backgrounds and statistics for how they behave and how helpful or dangerous they may be. Together, these three hardback volumes, in the hands of a dedicated DM (Dungeon Master) and a group of regular game players, are more than enough for an interested group to start their own game of D&D. But, there have been dozens of additional books put out by Wizards of the Coast since the 2014 release of the 5th Edition rules, offering new rules, new magic items, and new world-building backgrounds.

 

If you’re interested in starting to play Dungeons & Dragons, you’ll find the three core rule books to be essential reading. And check with the libraries — various branches offer opportunity for new and intermediate players to learn how to play the game, or to join a beginners group for some fun and imagination-challenging adventures.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to watch the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, released in 2023.)

 

( official Dungeons & Dragons web site )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Saturday, March 9, 2024

DVD/Movie Review: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer
(DVD Oppenheimer)

Oppenheimer is one of the front runners for Oscars on March 10th, leading all other films with 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.) and Best Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), plus numerous technical nominations.

 

At 3 full hours, Oppenheimer requires a commitment in its audience, but it ultimately pays off. The first third of the film is relatively slow going, but tension and pace gradually increase, set to Ludwig Goransson’s nerve-wracking score. This is part biography of Oppenheimer the man, and part historical recreation of one of the most pivotal eras in U.S. and World history.

 

The performances in this film are outstanding, especially Cillian Murphy’s haunting take as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. I particularly enjoyed Tom Conti as Albert Einstein in a couple of short but critical scenes. The production design, costume design, editing, cinematography (particularly around Los Alamos and the bomb testing site) are all top notch.

 

Though I was a bit bored by the first third of the film, and ended up breaking it up into two viewings, I’m glad I returned to it, because by the end of this movie I was so impressed that I ended up buying the DVD for my personal collection.

 

Oppenheimer was part of a unique cultural phenomenon in the summer of 2023. It opened the same day as Barbie, and many filmgoers called that pairing Barbenheimer — challenging each other to watch both landmark movies the same day or weekend. Both films were smash successes, and now find themselves up against each other in multiple Oscar categories (Barbie earned 8 nominations). Personally, I preferred Barbie, but that’s just my own taste. I certainly recognize that Oppenheimer is an exceptionally well-made film…and I strongly recommend it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it — especially those interested in world history.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert J. Sawyer.)

 

( Internet Movie Database entry for this film )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Friday, March 8, 2024

Music Book Review: The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines by Ferruccio Busoni and others

The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines
by Ferruccio Busoni and others (Music 780.904 Art)

When one thinks of early 20th century art movements, perhaps “I should look in the music library” isn’t the first phrase that comes into your mind, but in fact these early art movements involved artists from all kinds of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, theater, and yes, music! And these early art movements — I’m thinking in particular of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism — laid the groundwork for much of the art of the 20th Century, and continue to influence modern art and music today. The first of these movements was Futurism, which is officially noted as starting in 1909 in Italy with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. The Futurists produced lots of manifestos, and many of them pertain specifically to music. I remember first coming across them in the early days of the public internet, around the mid-1990s, which seemed fitting considering the Futurists’ categorical embrace of evolving technology and the hustle and bustle of modern cities. And most of them pertaining to music have been gathered together in a book called The Art of Noise, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

 

To begin, let’s address this book’s subtitle, which is “Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines.” That’s a pretty provocative title to get someone to open a book, isn’t it? I think that it may be overstating the case that one will find in these essays, and to be fair, this is one of those books that isn’t itself particularly scholarly in nature: it’s basically reprinting those same translations of the manifestos that have floated around the internet since its early days, along with an introduction by Danielle Lombardi that first appeared in Art Forum magazine. Outside of Lombardi’s introduction, you won’t really find any analysis of these manifestos and writings here, just the source documents themselves. But Lombardi’s article is a good choice for introducing new readers to the ideas found in Futurism, particularly in music. And one of the first observations that she makes addresses the subtitle of this book: while Futurists are often remembered as being pro-technology, pro-industrial age, celebrating machines and war and the rejection of tradition, the writings of their first major musical figure, Ferruccio Busoni, take a more moderate position that embraces both new and old ideas. In reality, much of the music of the Futurists continued to use traditional musical principles, while attempting to add new ideas, and brainstorm new possibilities. In this sense, the Futurists aren’t really that different from any other generations, with new ideas continuing to supplement the old.

 

In part, this misunderstanding is related to the tumultuous history of Italy in the early part of the 20th Century. While the Futurists got their start in 1909 (and perhaps a little earlier, considering some of Busoni’s writings dating back to 1906), Italy eventually turned to fascism after WWI, at which point much of the Futurist movement was suppressed publicly, replaced with nationalistic art much like what happened in Germany at the same time. Some of the Futurists, such as founder Marinetti, became fascists themselves, finding that some aspects of early Futurism like an admiration of war and the notion of establishing a new national identity translated well enough to the new regime. But most of the music written by futurists was lost, and only the manifestos, which had circulated around Europe in earlier years, survive. Even the legendary “intonarumori,” or “noise machines,” invented by Futurist musician Luigi Russolo around 1910, only survive in photos.


So what shall we make of these manifestos? One thing to bear in mind is that manifestos are historically done in a provocative style—their authors are generally compelled to write them to shake things up, socially, politically, artistically, or all of the above. But before anything gets shaken, you have to have readers! So some of the bravado and bluster of these writings can be taken with a grain of salt—on some level, they are attempting to capture readers and stimulate discussions, a more difficult feat back in the days before the internet, television, or even radio. The beginning of Francesco Pratella’s 1910 “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians” is a great example of this: his opening, “I appeal to the young,” is kind of the radio DJ “shock jock” rhetoric of over 100 years ago. He goes on to discuss what he feels is a kind of traditionalist mediocrity in Italian music of the era, comparing Italy’s scene to composers from various other countries (whom he amusingly praises and criticizes simultaneously). Like many manifestos, he eventually reaches a list of demands, such as abandoning the universities and conservatories, ignoring the music press, stepping away from music competitions, and “the liberation of individual musical sensibility from all imitation or influence of the past, feeling and singing with the spirit open to the future, drawing inspiration and aesthetics from nature, through all the human and extra-human phenomena present in it.” Regarding the latter, I find this both inspirational and naïve: obviously most music and art over time have taken inspiration from nature and humankind, so it’s a little silly to act as though rejecting all previous traditions will somehow land one in a new place. But he has some other interesting and more specific ideas that continued to resonate over time, such as “the reign of the singer must end,” a notion that no doubt influenced some of the intense symphonic writing of the early 20th C. from many composers.


Just a year later, Pratella’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music” opens with a much softer and historically realistic observation, simply that “All innovators have logically been Futurists in relation to their time.” Indeed! There’s no such thing as a totally new haircut, for example. What follows are some specific musical areas of inquiry that are indeed very forward-thinking for their time, such as considering the “chromatic atonal mode” for composing, an idea that had just begun to be spread elsewhere with Schoenberg’s earliest 12-tone pieces dating around 1908. He goes on to suggest looking into microtones, divisions of the octave even smaller than half-steps. He proposes similar investigation into more complex deployment of rhythms in music, and tempos that shift frequently. Just a couple years later in 1912, he writes again with more detail regarding rhythmic variation in music with his article “The Destruction of Quadrature,” which proposes different ways of perceiving and notating rhythmic groups that can take into account simultaneously-occurring rhythmic pulses, polyrhythms that can shift like the internal rhythms of free verse.

 

Busoni and Pratella may have been the foundational musical thinkers in the Futurist movement, but the most famous is likely Luigi Russolo, for his intonarumori machines mentioned above, and his manifesto describing their necessity and use, which was called “The Art of Noises” and published in 1913. Starting around this point we get to my favorite parts of this book, which place the work of the Futurists in a more purely creative, out-of-the-box, sometimes even childlike light. “The Art of Noises” started life as a letter from Russolo to Pratella, proposing that a family of “noises” could be incorporated into music, reflecting both sounds from the natural world and new sounds emanating from the hustle and bustle of then-modern cities. Russolo came up with six “families” or groupings of noises that could be conceptualized in a manner similar to the sections within an orchestra, and composed for them using a variety of instrumentation including his new “noise machines.” Russolo sent his letter to Pratella in March of 1913, and by June of that year, Russolo wrote an article documenting a June 2 performance that featured these new machines and ideas. There were machines produced for a variety of noises: the “Roarer,” “Thunderer,” “Burster,” Bubbler,” and so on. As mentioned earlier, sadly these instruments were lost over time, but we still have a written score for “Awakening of a City,” one of Russolo’s pieces that would have used these machines, featuring its own unique kind of graphic notation. Even without hearing much of these instruments in action—only a tiny fragment of recorded sound from the original machines survived—the ideas behind these sounds have been influential throughout the last century. Works by contemporaries like Arthur Honegger were influenced by Futurist ideas, as well as post WWII composers like John Cage, and within pop music idioms, industrial music and noise music in particular have embraced the Art of Noises in many different ways. There’s even the pop band who took their name from this document!


The remainder of this book falls into an “appendix” section, though the material is still very much related. Busoni’s 1906 article “Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Sound Art” is another spirited investigation that looks at the fundamentals of sound and proposes various new ways to expand musical resources. Just a few years before Futurism became an official movement, Busoni was already considering the primal implications of music’s emotional impact, questioning if present-day instruments and notation systems were capable of expressing the full range of these potential emotions, and proposing several ways to expand the possibilities: He proposed a system of third-tones that could further parse the octave even more than half-steps. He proposed several new ways to conceptualize harmony, including largely abandoning it altogether. And he continued to try to link these ideas to tangible emotional expression, which strikes me as an interesting contrast to the fairly intellectual manner in which serialism in music ultimately developed over subsequent decades.

 

Bruno Corra’s article about “chromatic music” is here, too, and it’s a fascinating piece from 1912 that is truly looking at the “chroma,” or “color” relationships that one could potentially establish between music and color. It documents a two-year project attempting to find useful, consistent connections between color and pitch, or music and light, dividing colors across pitches, and different hues of colors in different octaves. Futurist painter Carlo Carra’s essay closes out the book on a related note: writing more from a visual artist’s perspective, he challenges the reader to consider “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells.”

 

All told, it feels like these writings, and those of the Dada movement that followed soon after, led the world to consider art from exciting new perspectives that many contemporary artists still engage with every day. Reading these pieces, and discovering some of the first times that these ideas were expressed during the beginnings of modernism, can be inspiring, and cause one to think about their own interactions with music, either as music makers or listeners, from new angles.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Music of Dada by Peter Dayan.)

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!


Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Book Review: The Third to Die by Allison Brennan + Just Desserts meets tonight

The Third to Die
by Allison Brennan (Brennan)

In January 2024, the libraries’ Just Desserts mystery book group reading assignment was “any of the thriller/suspense novels by American author Allison Brennan. Since most of Brennan’s works fall into series, and I had jumping in the middle of a series, I managed to get my hands on a copy of The Third to Die, which is the first entry in Brennan’s “Quinn & Costa” series, released in 2020 (there have been four more in that series since then).

 

Kara Quinn is an L.A.P.D. detective specializing in deep undercover work. She’s got a checkered past, and is currently on an enforced leave/vacation to her old hometown in Washington state, to let a complicated situation in L.A. cool down. While jogging early one morning, she ends up discovering a murder victim at the side of a local lake. It turns out that this victim is the latest in a serial killer’s pattern of killing on March 3rd, 6th and 9th, every third year. This brings FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt Costa and his newly former (in fact, still-being-formed) rapid-response team to Liberty Lake, in hopes of preventing the killer from striking again.

 

The Third to Die is a solid, well-plotted thriller, dealing with police procedures, inter-agency squabbling, and psychological profiling. Chapters alternate being told from the points of view of Costa, Quinn and the killer themself. Pacing is brisk, and characterizations are well-done. Even if I thought there was a lot of coincidental stuff happening in the plot, I was still carried along by what was happening, and feel I can give this a fairly strong recommendation!.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the rest of Allison Brennan‘s body of work, especially the other four entries in the Quinn & Costa series.)

 

( official Allison Brennan web site )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!



If you're a mystery fan, you're invited to join us for this month's Just Desserts meeting tonight, February 29th, at 6:30 p.m. in the 4th floor auditorium of the Bennett Martin Public Library downtown at 14th & "N" St. -- this mystery-themed discussion group meets on the last Thursday of each month, January through October. Tonight, we'll be discussing the recent thriller The Only One Left by American thriller/suspense author Riley Sager.

 

Even if you haven't read The Only One Left for this specific discussion, you can still participate, and learn about great new mysteries to try! For more information, check out the Just Desserts schedule at https://lincolnlibraries.org/bookguide/book-groups/#justdesserts

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Book Review: A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter

A Grandmother Begins the Story
by Michelle Porter (Porter)

Award winning Metis author Michelle Porter brings to life a brilliant ensemble of storytellers, which includes five generations of women, some buffalo, the earth itself, and a couple of yappy dogs. It starts in the middle, as all great stories do; telling of the past and future, rambling through the spirit world, the dance hall, and the grasslands. I found the way the stories were told, separately, but interlaced, distinct points of view describing shared histories, captivating. In the mixed up world of living, it makes sense to me. Mostly a telling of relationships between sisters and mothers and daughters, but you can’t have those without a few menfolk thrown in. Definitely one I I’d like to read again. (If only to decide if that one chapter was really necessary.)

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, Two Old Women by Velma Wallis, The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson, or Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson.)

 

( Wikipedia page for Michelle Porter )

 

Recommended by Carrie K.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Book Review: The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

The Man Who Fell to Earth
by Walter Tevis (Tevis) and
The Man Who Fell to Earth (graphic novel)
by Dan Watters and Dev Pramanik, adapted from the 1976 film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg, which was adapted from the Tevis novel (741.5 Tev)

If you ask most people nowadays if they’ve heard of The Man Who Fell to Earth, they’d probably mention having seen David Bowie (in his first major acting role) in the 1976 film by director Nicholas Roeg of that title. But is was actually a classic scifi novel before that film adapted the story (with some changes) for the big screen.

 

Thomas Jerome Newton may look human, but he’s not. He’s a visitor from a distant planet — an emissary from his own dying people, sent to Earth to manipulate both events and technological developments in order to surreptitiously build a spacecraft that can be used to return to his dying planet and ferry the rest of his people to our world. But he’s supposed to do it without attracting dangerous attention to himself. He is only partially successful.

 

This is a quiet, thoughtful science fiction novel that fits more into the “social science fiction” category. It is “scifi as written by a mainstream author”. Newton is a highly sympathetic character, separated from all he knows and values and surrounded by those he considers to be only rudimentally intelligent. It is a profile of loneliness and isolation and self-reflection, as Newton eventually grows to question the value of his own underlying mission.

 

In addition to the famed 1976 film, this story was adapted into the unsold pilot for a 1986 TV series (available on YouTube in its entirety), and a 2022 10-part Showtime series, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, was an official “sequel” to the David Bowie movie, with Bill Nighy taking over the Bowie role as Newton.

 

The 1963 novel is definitely a thing of its time, with certain glimpses of futuristic technology now looking absurdly quaint. But it is still well-written and I believe it justifies its place in the series of “SF Masterworks” of the 20th century. If you like it — check out Walter Tevis’ other novels, including Mockingbird, The Queen’s Gambit (turned into a 7-episode limited series on Netflix in 2020), The Hustler and The Color of Money (both adapted into classic feature films starring Paul Newman), among others.

 

If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Man Who Fell to Earth (graphic novel adaptation of the 1974 film by Nicolas Roeg starring David Bowie) by Dan Watters and Dev Pramanik. The film (and thus this graphic novel adaptation of the film) differs in several key facets from the original novel, notably in the presence of sex scenes and slightly different end fates for some of the characters. Having just read the novel, I was amused at the changes that are clearly evident in the graphic novel, but even then, it still gets across its messages about isolation, loneliness, addiction and corrupt power. And the artist does a good job of capturing the appearances of cast members David Bowie, Rip Torn, Bucky Henry, Candy Clark and Bernie Casey. I give both versions a 7 on our 1-10 rating scale.

 

( Wikipedia page for Walter Tevis, with links to info about all versions of The Man Who Fell to Earth )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Monday, February 26, 2024

DVD Review: Miss Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries + Just Desserts meeting later this week

Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries
(DVD Miss)

Last month I reviewed “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” on DVD, that take place in the late 1920’s Melbourne, Australia. That series is based on the Phryne Fisher books by Kerry Greenwood.

 

Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries is an offshoot and revolves around Miss Fisher’s niece, Peregrine Fisher, in 1960’s Melbourne. Peregrine inherits Phryne’s fortune when she goes missing after crashing in the jungle over New Guinea. Peregrine had never met her aunt and decides to follow in her footsteps to become a private-detective. She makes her way to Phryne’s club, The Adventuresses’ Club, where she is befriended by the other members who thought highly of Phryne.

 

I wasn’t sure I’d take to this series because I’m not that fond of the 1960’s – the color schemes, the furniture, the blatant sexism. But I ended up enjoying the characters, the mysteries, and watching Peregrine take on the challenges of meeting, learning from, and befriending the exceptional women of the Adventuresses’ Club.


Of course our thoroughly modern heroine meets a straitlaced guy, James, who is a police detective (just as her aunt did). He tries to dissuade her from investigating the various murders she encounters but they end up teaming together – against the wishes of his captain.

 

Produced by Acorn, the library owns all of this series on DVD.

 

( Internet Movie Database entry for this series )

 

See Charlotte M.’s review of The Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries in the January 2024 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!



If you're a mystery fan, you're invited to join us for this month's Just Desserts meeting this coming Thursday, February 29th, at 6:30 p.m. in the 4th floor auditorium of the Bennett Martin Public Library downtown at 14th & "N" St. -- this mystery-themed discussion group meets on the last Thursday of each month, January through October. Tonight, we'll be discussing the recent thriller The Only One Left by American thriller/suspense author Riley Sager.

 

Even if you haven't read The Only One Left for this specific discussion, you can still participate, and learn about great new mysteries to try! For more information, check out the Just Desserts schedule at https://lincolnlibraries.org/bookguide/book-groups/#justdesserts

Saturday, February 24, 2024

DVD Review: Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel)

Station Eleven
TV mini-series based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel (DVD Station)

One of my daughter’s favorite books is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a book about what happens when the swine flu Pandemic kills off most of the population. Mind you, this book was published in 2014, years before COVID. Because of the focus on trying to keep culture alive, specifically theater, music and literature, I decided to give the new mini-series a try. The mini-series, Station Eleven, is based on the internationally acclaimed novel but with many changes in characters and plot. Even so, the series holds the same basic idea: survivors of the Pandemic must attempt to rebuild their world while keeping hold of the best of their culture: Shakespeare plays, music performance, and literature. A group of survivors bands together, calling themselves the Traveling Symphony, performing plays on their established route around Lake Michigan. Small groups of survivors who have formed new communities such as the one at the Severn Airport in Michigan invite the players to come perform for them. This happens 20 years after the Pandemic, bringing together all of the storylines and resolving them in one climactic performance. Much of the series revolves around a graphic novel that was created by one of the characters. Referred to as “the prophecy,” all of the main characters have some tie to this novel — only a few copies exist, but the impact of the story affects many people over the course of these twenty years.

 

I have to say that I really enjoyed the post-Pandemic story and how connected all of these characters were to the mission to save the best of humanity. However, the DVD set had no rating. I would view this with caution due to Language; Graphic Violence; Adult Situations; and Themes.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and the film adaptation of that, The Road starring Viggo Mortensen.)

 

(Also available in traditional print format.)

 

( Internet Movie Database entry for this 10-episode mini-series )

 

Recommended by Kim J.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched (or read) this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?


New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Friday, February 23, 2024

Music Book Review: Schoenberg - Why He Matters by Harvey Sachs

Schoenberg: Why He Matters
by Harvey Sachs (Music 780.92 Sch)

There have been a series of books about pop artists lately that include something about them “mattering” in the title. We have a couple of them: Why Sinead O’Connor Matters, Why Patti Smith Matters, and Why Bushwick Bill Matters come to mind. But I never expected to see one about one of the most well-known composers of the 20th Century. That’s why I was a little amused to see the title of Harvey Sachs’ latest book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters. It addresses some serious questions about the Schoenberg legacy, though, and I think it’s an important book, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

 

Sachs lays out the meaning of his title, and the necessity for the book, in his prologue. Although Schoenberg is remembered for being a very influential composer, his music is rarely played today. The 12-tone system of music that he is most known for was interesting and influential in its time, but today it is almost never used, and the atonality it produces is largely out of style again in a general sense, much less by way of Schoenberg’s formal considerations. Sachs also discusses his choice to proceed with this book in as non-technical a manner as possible. This isn’t a book that will require readers to understand music theory and follow formal analysis of 12-tone pieces, perhaps a first for writing about the composer. I found this refreshing: this is a body of work that has mostly been set aside for its reputation as being technical in nature and wholly dissonant in its approach, but I must admit that I have long been an enthusiast of Schoenberg’s music, and what I find to be most notable in his best works is a tremendous feeling for melody. His posthumous reputation stands somewhat at odds with the sound of his actual music, in my opinion. Perhaps this is the only kind of approach to a book about the composer and his music that can realistically help to correct that record.

 

It’s an unusual book. For the most part, Sachs has written a traditional biography here, following Schoenberg’s life chronologically. However, when he traverses into the more “controversial” periods of Schoenberg’s music, all surrounding his gradual shift toward atonality and the 12-tone technique, he pauses for moments of layperson musical analysis and also focuses on the social and interpersonal implications of the pieces, their performances, and their early reception by audiences. The musical analysis tends to be easy to follow, and often focuses on elements of performance practice around this music that have frequently conspired to obscure Schoenberg’s musical intentions.

 

What are these intentions? Reading between the lines here, I really see them as having a very advanced and moving knack for melody, and for writing the kinds of textures beneath melodies that can really highlight their sometimes unusual, fragile natures. As Sachs proceeds through Schoenberg’s life and major works, I can’t help but to put together a bit of a secondary narrative around the music, some of which is explicit in the text, but some of which is more implicit once one starts to think about the musical evolution that happened over Schoenberg’s lifetime. His early works were still very much rooted in German Romanticism, which despite its increased reliance on chromaticism, was still a solidly tonal form of writing. The early works were often larger in scale, too, such as the tone poem “Pelleas and Melisande.” The transitional pieces like his celebrated “Pierrot Lunaire” are a kind of free atonality, and generally written for small ensembles. The lightness of orchestration often helps to clarify his emphasis on melody to my way of listening — check out his string quartets for a great example of this in action that you can compare across his long career, too. We finally arrive at the 12-tone period, from 1921 onward, where again the most representative pieces tend to be for smaller chamber ensembles or for the piano, and though there is a somewhat more strict kind of atonality — Schoenberg really strives to obscure any kind of tonal gravity taking form — the pieces are still somewhat free, too. 12-tone or “serial” composers, at least among this first generation, weren’t so strict as some of their successors like Babbit or Stockhausen.

 

Yes, Schoenberg and some of his contemporaries like Berg and Webern were looking for new kinds of sounds not so grounded in tonality, but this isn’t noise music. Harmonic function may be blurred beyond recognition, but in its wake, the gravitas of melody seems to take on an even deeper role. One problematic area, though, is that musicians simply aren’t trained to play atonally — the exercises and other music played over time all reinforce tonal performance habits. This means that in performance, musicians often find these pieces more difficult than other repertoire, and as a result many performances take place at slower tempos than Schoenberg intended. Sachs makes reference to this phenomenon several times throughout the book, and each time there is a detrimental effect on the feeling of the piece, the grace of the melodies. For example, in reference to Schoenberg’s Minuet from the ”Serenade,” Sachs notes that performances all take place around 20 bpm slower than specified in the music, “And this eliminated not only the ‘singing’ quality that the composer specifically requested but also the whole notion of the minuet as a dance: at too slow a tempo, the music plods, beat by beat.” Much of the misunderstanding of this music, then, may be related to performances that simply don’t match the musical intention. Where Schoenberg aimed for light, airy textures, we often hear these plodding performances.

 

Sachs does a great job of humanizing the composer as well. His long-term frenemy relationship with Stravinsky, for example, makes occasional appearances in the book, as well as Schoenberg’s occasionally prickly opinions about other composers as well. His complicated relationship with his Jewish background and Christian faith are explored, as well as his struggles with anti-Semitism and difficult audiences in his native Vienna. His economic difficulties later in life are discussed. He lived a deeply fascinating life, and knowing more about it will hopefully compel some readers to give his music another listen, too.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Schoenberg and his World by Walter Frisch or Arnold Schoenberg by Bojan Bujić.)

 

( Wikipedia page about Arnold Schoenberg ) | ( official Harvey Sachs web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!


Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!