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Recent Posts
- What’s New for the 1st of March: Emma Bull’s War for The Oaks, Rosanne Cash’s ‘Runaway Train’, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, plus new Americana and jazz music
- A Kinrorwan Estate story: Cranachanh
- What’s New for the 15th of February: Some Seanan McGuire fantasy, Alison Bechdel’s latest, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin; Nordic sounds, old time, Americana and Tex-Mex music
- What’s New for the 1st of February: Kage Baker retrospective; new Americana, Buddhist chants and Finnish songs, new and reissued jazz, and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Fireplaces in Kinrowan Hall
- What’s New for the 18th of January: World music and fiction by Amal El-Mohtar
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Bridges and Paths plus a Troll
- What’s New for the 4th of January: Favorite books and music of 2025
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Mythologist John Campbell
- What’s New for 21st of December
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Pub Ghoulies
- What’s New for 7 of December: books by Alan Garner, and holiday music new and old, Celtic, Americana, jazz and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Several Annies, Part Two
- What’s New for 23 November
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Several Annies
- What’s New for the 9th of November: rhymers and ravens, folk songs and folk tales, jazz guitar and dark forests and constellations put to music, Hungarian tunes and knights and rakes and tinkers and fools, and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Kedgeree
- Whats New for the 26th of October: some Patricia McKillip books and an interview, ’70s jazz reissues, Nordic Americana and American Americana, and some Samhain seasonal albums
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Charles and Alice Pay a Visit (A Letter to Owyn)
- What’s New for the 12th of October
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Pudding Contest
- What’s New for the 28th of September: Appalachia in books, music and more
- A Kinrown Estate story: Autumn is Upon Us
- What’s New for the 14th of September: Books, film and music with a piratical theme; plus Corsican polyphony, Balkan sevdah, Americana music, Hardanger fiddle with reindeer, Latin jazz and piano trios
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Irish Coffee
- New SF from James S. A. Corey; Terry Gillian’s Excalibur; Rolling Stones do Aaron Copland’s ‘A Fanfare for The Common Man’; An offbeat history of coffee; an interview with Russian folk singer Zhenya Wind; and a grab bag of folk music
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Waltzing Matilda
- What’s New for the 17th of August: Lots of Cropredy reports and reviews, and some new jazz and Americana;
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Hidden Dragon
- What’s New for the 3rd of August: A mix of Heinlein reviews; new jazz out of Vermont and a grab bag of archival reviews; Italian American food writing, and more
Tag Archives: biography
Four books about Bob Dylan, reviewed in free verse
Carl Benson’s The Bob Dylan Companion: Four Decades Of Commentary Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan: A Life In Stolen Moments, Day By Day 1941-1995 Paul Williams’s Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, The Early Years 1960-1973 Paul Williams’s Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, The … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Music
Tagged Americana music, biography, Bob Dylan, rock and roll
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Evan I. Schwartz’s Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story
Faith J. Cormier wrote this review. Finding Oz is a biography of L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. Rather than being one of those ghastly concoctions that look at their subjects’ public lives in total isolation from the … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Americana, biography, L. Frank Baum, nonfiction
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Giorgia Grilli’s Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins: the Governess as Provacteur; and Valerie Lawson’s Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers
Faced with two books on a similar theme, where one is a critical analysis and the other a biography, I am generally inclined to the critical analysis. As an academic historian, I regard biography with a certain amount of suspicion. … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged biography, fantasy, literary criticism, literary fiction
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Jack Vance’s This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is I)
Jack Vance has been one of the most continuously productive and popular and arguably one of the most influential writers of science-fiction. He’s also a mystery writer of note. (His is a name that I see popping up again and … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged autobiography, biography, non-fiction
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Luis Ortiz’ Emshwiller: Infinity x Two — The Art and Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller
“I like the idea of going through different careers. It’s like being reborn a number of times.” That is probably the best summation of Ed Emshwiller’s life, from the horse’s mouth. Known to science-fiction fans of the 1950s, ’60s and … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged biography, illustration, nonfiction, science fiction
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Colin McPhee’s A House in Bali
Colin McPhee, a Canadian-American composer who had much more influence on American music than the body of his music might indicate (see Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol J. Oja), left behind two books that were as influential, … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged autobiography, biography, music
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Carol J. Oja’s Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds
The music of the East, particularly the gamelan of Indonesia, and even more particularly that of Bali, has a longer history of interaction with the music of the West than many might imagine. Claude Debussy first encountered the gamelan in … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged American music, biography, music, world music
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Jean-Marie Déguignet’s Memoirs of a Breton Peasant [ed. Bernez Rouz; English trans. Linda Asher]
It is not often that one gets to read the memoirs of a peasant, because it’s not often that a peasant writes a memoir. This particular peasant was Breton, which is, for those fascinated by a part of the world … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged autobiography, biography, history
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Joseph Bristow, ed.: Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend
From the vantage of a century later, it’s hard for us to understand the last years of Oscar Wilde’s life and those immediately after his death. His disgrace after his conviction for committing acts of “gross indecency” with another man … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged biography, critical studies
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Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey
I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s books for decades, beginning with the massive, four volume The Masks of God in the late 1960s or 1970s. (I’m not sure what it says about me that I would jump right into a 2,000 … Continue reading