Reviews and Comments

Koven Smith

5easypieces@book.dansmonorage.blue

Joined 1 year, 10 months ago

Arts grantmaker living in Austin, TX. Jazz, museums, pre-Kurtzman Star Trek, so forth and such as. Also in the fediverse at @5easypieces@social.coop.

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Dilla Time (2022, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 5 stars

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of …

Wish all music books were like this

5 stars

This book was fabulous. Well-researched and compelling, it doubles as a history of Detroit in addition to a study of both the musical and social importance of Dilla himself.

Debussy (Hardcover, 2018) 3 stars

A beautifully written and original biography of one of the greatest and most popular of …

A bit more of a slog than I would have liked. There are occasional moments of real insight here, but mostly the book feels like neither fish nor fowl—not technical enough to read as a thorough analysis, but also without enough biographical detail to really bring Debussy alive as a person. Nice, but hardly definitive.

Sea of Tranquility (Hardcover, 2022, Knopf) 4 stars

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …

Fun, lightweight

3 stars

A breezy, fun(ish, given some of the subject matter) read. The resolution of the book hinges, somewhat, on a twist that is revealed near the end, and I must confess that I was finding the book far more satisfying up to the point that the twist was revealed. It just felt a bit too “plotty” to me in a book that otherwise revels in nice details.