Detailed item info | Size | | Length: | 200 pages | | Height: | 8.8 in. | | Width: | 5.8 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 13.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | In The New Renaissance, Robertson offers an important historical perspective on the computer revolution by comparing it to three earlier landmarks of human invention - language, writing, and printing. We see how each of these inventions changed the way we produce, store, and distribute information, and how each one thereby triggered an information explosion that transformed human civilization. But the electronic computer has touched off the largest information explosion yet. It is therefore the most important invention in the history of technology, if not in all history. What can we expect from the most important technological breakthrough in human history? Robertson lays out possible scenarios regarding transformations in science and mathematics, education, language, the arts, and everyday life.
| | Industry reviews | Giddins, jazz critic for the Village Voice, divides the first 100 years of jazz into eight stages, which he describes through brief critical/biographical sketches, several of which have been previously published. After covering such precursors as W.C. Handy, he turns his attention to pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, popularizers such as Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra, modernist boppers, and the mainstream sounds of Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. He concludes with such proponents of the avant-garde as Ornette Coleman, the undefined "struggling music" of such jazz artists as David Murray and Don Pullen, and the contemporary traditionalism of the likes of Joshua Redman and Steven Scott. The author places some giants such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in multiple sections and intentionally excludes dozens of jazz innovators. Though obviously knowledgeable after 25 years as a critic, Giddens fails to explain the rationale for his stages, for linking artists within a stage, for showing the interplay between various stages, and for providing a social/historical context for a century of music. His book is thus too disjointed to be an introduction and too familiar and unresearched for jazz buffs. David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Kakutani
If, as Thelonious Monk once said, talking about music is like dancing about painting, Giddins, a Village Voice jazz critic since 1973, is a wonderful dancer. His sixth book, a panoramic look at the history of jazz since the turn of the century, begins with white musicians performing in blackface, concludes with a black musician (Don Byron) investigating Klezmer, and lists every step in between, without once coming off as frantic or forced. Less of a history than a series of appreciations, the book's heart is divided between Armstrong ("the thing itself, the transfiguring agent, the artist, the master of masterworks that could withstand generations of shifting tastes and critical scrutiny") and Ellington (whose "music is Shakespearean in its reach, wisdom and generosity"). In between, chapters devoted to dozens of visionaries, both famous and obscure, cast the well-known in a new light and demystify the heretofore inaccessible. Though his greatest gift is a knack for translating musical experience into concrete prose (e.g., first listening to Gerry Mulligan is like "trying to climb a glass wall"), Giddins is also a consummate historian and fearless contrarian. Ultimately, however, this book's composition lacks the rigor of his prose. Too often, the essays appear spackled together, bearing too close a resemblance to individual articles and obituaries and targeting specific albums or reissues at the expense of providing an objective overview of the artists' work. (Sept.)
Bukey
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