Joe Sample is right: Randy Crawford has immense control of her voice. I hardly can imagine a singer able to produce a more pure vocal line. “All Night Long,” written by Curtis Lewis, and sung by Aretha Franklin in her early days, is about a man who haunts a woman’s dreams, though she does not know him well: on Feeling Good, it is bluesy, passionate.
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A Generation’s Work Continues: Neil Young’s Living With War
The false intelligence, the expectation of military success, and the early sense of triumph and victory have given way to death, the bodies returning home with little ceremony, to increasing losses on both sides, to grief and bad memories, all recounted in Young’s “Shock and Awe,” with its propulsive, shimmery percussion, jangling guitar notes, and grief-filled horn, a song in which Young recalls, “We had a chance to change our mind, but somehow wisdom was hard to find.
Dissent is the Highest Form of Democracy: Michael Franti and Spearhead’s Yell Fire!
Yell Fire! is another chapter in Michael Franti’s career, another attempt to do work that expresses his personal sense of the world and his place in it. He is someone who does not quite fit common expectations: he is not selling our own greed and desire for glamour back to us, nor, though young and handsome, is he selling sex to us, or stupidity or hatred. He has invested in mind, sensitivity, and public concern; and his reward will be our awareness and our active—or activist—response.
Here We Are, On Earth Together: Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book
A review of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
As a feat of storytelling, though, The Ministry of Fear is both instructive (e.g. for the way certain significant events happen “off-stage” and the way in which certain characters – Prentice being one – act as a lodestone or lightening rod for the emotional force of the story) and impressive. This is a minor work, then, but a novel with its own strengths and satisfactions; and it is an interesting precursor of much of what was to follow.
A review of The Quiet by Paul Wilson
The Quiet is an easy to read book which steers clear of too much dogma and focuses instead on helping readers achieve their own sense of calm. It is written in simple plain language on nice matt recycled paper, with attractive turquoise diagrams.
A review of You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
Under the fury and passion individual characters disappear. Motivations become subterranean and capricious. The book becomes plastic elastic where anything can happen. It is unforgivably extravagant to base so much of the book on the encounters of two sweaty bodies.
A review of My Antonia by Willa Cather
My Antonia is a great novel, a classic that does not disappoint. Perhaps most of all, it is about what true wealth is. Reading it, one is reminded often of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley: there is the same look back toward childhood and the same richly allusive and resonant symbolism.
A review of Reuben Fine by Aidan Woodger
Although the games are, naturally, the meat of the book, Woodger also finds space to include an immense amount of other interesting information: tables of all Fine’s tournament and match results; a brief biography; an annotated bibliography of all of Fine’s writings on chess; myriad appreciations of his play from the great and the good; a précis of a paper on blindfold chess (i.e. chess played without sight of the board and pieces) that Fine published in an academic journal in 1965; and much else besides.
A review of Every Move You Make by David Malouf
Although “The Domestic Cantata” is the most complex and extraordinary of the stories in this collection, all of the stories are set off by Malouf’s clear love of life that underpins the work. The plots move easily and the characters all develop forward, but it is the collective meaning created by the glimpse at something that goes beyond the prose that builds these stories that makes them so remarkable. This is a not to be missed collection of stories that are as important as they are pleasurable.