Phillips, who found Elvis, Cash, gets bio
‘Black Dragon River’ seeks China, Russia
By Michael Hill
‘Sam
Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll” (Little, Brown and Co), by
It was getting late at Sam Phillip’s tiny studio in Memphis, Tennessee, maybe time for a break. The local kid Phillips had called into the studio, Elvis Presley, had a good voice, but had yet to show that unique quality that Phillips was searching so hard to find.
Then Presley suddenly threw himself into an impassioned version of the old blues tune “That’s All Right, Mama,” taking the guitarist and bassist with him. Phillips asked them what they were doing. They said they didn’t know. Well back up, Phillips said, and do it again.
If Phillips had only caught lightning one time, he would have earned his place in rock history as the founder of Sun Records and the discoverer of Elvis. But then came Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Oh, and Phillips also recorded Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88”, often called the first rock ‘n’ roll record.
Phillips’ single-minded vision was to record the “unique quality” of worthy musicians, and Phillips found a bunch of them in his mid-20th century heyday. It helped that Phillips was a radio veteran with precise thoughts on how to make records and the expertise to do it. That “slapback” echo sound Phillips developed for his Sun recordings pretty much defines what early rock sounds like.
Guralnick, a veteran music journalist who wrote an acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis, knows the incredibly rich Memphis music landscape well. In fact, he knew Phillips well in the decades before the music pioneer’s death in 2003. Guralnick paints a detailed and sympathetic picture of Phillips as a relentless visionary, a talker, a loving but imperfect family man and a perfectionist who relished imperfections that could make recordings special.
One example: Perkins actually slipped up when he shouted “go, cat, go!” during his recording of “Blue Suede Shoes”. Perkins wanted another take to correct it to “go, man, go” and to fix a mistake he made on guitar. Phillips told him no: that was the take with “the excitement”.
Like an incandescent nova, Sun burned out. Phillips’ tiny label had a hard time holding on to the big stars he launched. And his ego had a tough time dealing with that. Phillips eventually sold his majority. He continued with radio and music projects, though not with the same epochal effects.
The end of the book bogs down by devoting too many pages to these later years. It’s no match for the forward motion of Sun’s glory years when, as Jerry Wexler said, Phillips recorded a “millennium’s worth of music” in a decade.
“Devotion”
(Ballantine Books), by
In the spirit of “Unbroken” and “The Boys in the Boat” comes “Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice” by journalist Adam Makos.
This time the setting is the early days of the Korean War. And, again, the author chooses to focus on a littleknown event in history. Makos, a masterful storyteller, focuses on Jesse Brown, who grew up in a Mississippi sharecropper family, graduated from high school, joined the US Navy and quickly rose through the ranks to become the nation’s first black carrier pilot.
“Devotion” pivots on the unlikely friendship between Brown and Tom Hudner, a white New Englander who attended Harvard University and the Naval Academy. He explores the blatant racism of early 1950s through the unique lens of wartime.
In the introduction, Makos refers to his staff — and their work here is impressive. Hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of veterans and their families, thousands of pages of documents, articles, love letters and visits to key locations from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to North Korea bring “Devotion” to life with amazing vividness.
The battles, the conversations, the struggles — they feel real in a way those in a lesser-well researched book never could. And Makos’ writing never gets in the way of the story.
“As the daylight faded, the temperature was plummeting. The sweat on Tom’s skin froze like a layer of frost and he shivered.” It’s elegant in its simplicity. Most of all, this is a dense book that reads like a dream. The perfectly paced story cruises along in the fast lane — when you’re finished, you’ll want to start all over again.
“Black Dragon River” Press), by
The border between the United States and Mexico is almost 2,000 miles long. The border between Russia and China, two of the world’s most powerful and intriguing nations, is around 2,700 miles. Considering the intricate dramas of the US-Mexico border, anyone with a passion for how cultures come together should perk up at the Far Eastern promise of “Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires”.
Another good sign: The author is
(Penguin Asia editor for The Economist.
But settle in. It takes 270 pages to reach the key line, “I was curious to know more about the Chinese and their place in the Russian Far East today.”
Author Dominic Ziegler instead draws deeply on history while traveling down the river that, with tributaries, marks much of the Russia-China border. As he makes his way through rural Mongolia to begin his journey, he sets the scene with 13th-century tales of Genghis Khan, whose Mongols sacked both Beijing and the seat of early Russian civilization, Kiev.
The layers continue as Ziegler moves downstream, including Cossack conquest in vast Siberia and an extraordinary meeting of thousands of emissaries of two of history’s most intellectually curious leaders, Peter the Great and the Kangxi emperor. The treaty they concluded in 1689, the first between Russia and China, was negotiated on such equal terms that the two sides used Latin as a neutral language.
It was that early respectful encounter, Ziegler argues, that has set China’s relationship with Russia apart from its later relationships with other Western powers, which are weighted with what the Chinese government has bitterly called a “century of humiliation”.
That doesn’t mean relations have necessarily been warm, and Zeigler spends quite a bit of his travels in Russian cities and towns far from the border with China, apparently for logistical or security reasons.
The result is a great deal of Russian history, while you’d think little happened over in China in the centuries between the Kangxi emperor and the rise of Mao Zedong.
But why complain when there are so many distractions? Like a good traveler, Zeigler wanders over to anything interesting. “A Buddhist republic within the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation: How could this be?” he writes, then mucks around happily for the next 24 pages. Much later on, he takes a look around Russia’s oblast, or province, of Birobidzhan, “nothing less than the modern world’s first Jewish homeland”.
Eventually, though, you do start to hope for some actual modern-day mixing of Russians and Chinese. This book barely delivers. By the time the journey drifts into the current day, the Amur River bends north and leaves China behind. In a handful of pages before he plunges with it toward the Pacific, Zeigler just hints at the wrenching change of fortunes for the two great powers over the past few decades.
In the briefest of encounters with a Chinese trader at a border city, Zeigler mentions past “tales of awestruck Chinese who had never seen a fridge or a hair dryer till they crossed the Amur” into Russia. The trader practically snorts with disdain.
These days, Russians in the remote borderland are a “population sliding into degrading poverty,” trying to dismiss the lights and bustle of Chinese cities across the river as nothing but a Potemkin village, Ziegler writes.
It will take another book, and a more focused journey, to tell us more about how these sometimes prickly cultures really interact, not through the sweep of history, but in the galloping day to day.
“Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World” (St Martin’s Press,) by
The science is clear and the warnings are dire: Man-made climate change is happening and will adversely affect human life on this planet.
Both the effects of climate change and the political obfuscation stalling meaningful education and action to create a better future can seem insurmountable.
But in “Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World,” author Bill Nye — yes, former host of the television series “Bill Nye the Science Guy” — sees relentless human ingenuity as reason to hope.
It’s the second book from the engineer-turned-popular science educator; his first, “Undeniable”, proved his likeability and knack for explaining evolutionary science and its application to our lives.
Back with a bow tie and enthusiasm that vaults off the page, Nye explains the basics of climate science without making “Unstoppable” feel like a textbook. It’s more of a call to arms — an enlisting of the Next Great Generation before we’re all drafted into a mismanaged fight.
Nye spends most of his book laying out the pros and cons of various technological improvements that homeowners could try to improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint. He does the same thing that he used to do on his TV show — he encourages you to try it out, just to see what happens. It’s a pure science experiment, and if it doesn’t work, try something else!
He also makes a case for reconsidering nuclear power and genetically modified crops. Look at everything that technology and experimentation have improved for humans, Nye says. Why stop now, why be afraid, facing climate change?
If any of Nye’s formers viewers or more recent fans have somehow lost their enthusiasm for asking questions and brainstorming, “Unstoppable” will get them back on track. (AP)