Death Before Sentencing
Making a case for substantial prison reform, this week's review examines the lack of accountability American county and local jail systems take for the avoidable deaths of detainees.
Posted on in Review of the Week
The Literature of American Popular Music
To commemorate last night's Grammy Awards, this week's review examines the development of American popular music through myriad genres and historical works
Posted on April 4, 2022 in Review of the Week
Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
Weisbard, Eric. Duke, 2021
552p bibl index, 9781478011941 $124.95, 9781478014089 $27.95, 978147802139
Weisbard (American studies, Univ. of Alabama) offers brief essays on 158 works, and presents them as influential in the development of American popular music over the past 250 years. Organized chronologically, the works include a small number of actual songbooks, but most are genre studies, memoirs/biographies, and other nonfiction works about aspects of popular music. Journals and works of fiction, poetry, and theater make appearances here and there. Weisbard looks at works on a wide range of popular music genres, giving special attention to genres that have attracted the most scholarly discussion and controversy—for example, jazz. A few of the works are about related subjects such as dance, sociology, and classical music. In contrast to many book reviews, Weisbard’s essays tend to launch quickly into larger discussions about influential scholarship. In that way, the featured works serve as gateways to more expansive explorations of important people and writings. Thick with mentions of scholars, scholarly works, and contrasting viewpoints, the essays will be daunting for nonspecialists, but serious students of American popular music will find the book a strong introduction to the literature and scholarship that have defined American popular music.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: D. Beisswenger, University of Arkansas
Subject: Humanities – Performing Arts – Music
Choice Issue: Apr 2022
Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of related titles:
- Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States
- After “Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age
- Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics
- Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations
- The Poetry of Pop
- Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States
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