Product Description
An excellent comprehensive tribute to the epitome of reggae music. 35 of Marley's best, complete with 8 pages of color photos, black and white photos throughout, an introduction by Marley's daughter, and separate lyric pages. Songs include: Could You Be Loved Exodus Get Up, Stand Up I Shot The Sheriff Jammin' Natural Mystic No Woman No Cry Please Don't Rock My Boat Redemption Song Stir It Up Three Little Birds and more! A must for any reggae fan.
Customer Reviews:
Book o' Bob.......2006-02-25
It's a good coffee table book. My guitarist friends and I can play a lot of songs out of it. Even if you don't follow the strum pattern in it what you play still sounds good.
Enjoyed it........2004-05-30
I really enjoyed this book. If you are a new fan, as i am, you will find it a worthwhile. I'm still learning about Bob Marley, and this book was a great source of information.
Bob Markey - Songs of Freedom.......2000-04-04
This book contains sheet music arrangements for piano and voice with guitar chords.
This is an excellent compilation of what I believe to be some of Bob Marley's best work. In addition to the sheet music, the book features an introduction by Marley's daughter, black and white photographs throughout, and eight pages of colour photos. If you like playing reggae, this book is a must.
Song List:
Africa Unite; Belly Full (Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)); Coming In From The Cold;
Concrete Jungle; Could You Be Loved; Easy Skanking; Exodus; Get Up Stand Up; Guava Jelly; I Shot The Sheriff; I'm Hurting Inside (Hurting Inside); I'm Still Waiting; Iron Lion Zion; Is This Love; Jammin'; Lick Samba; Lively Up Yourself; Mellow Mood; Natural Mystic; Nice Time; No Woman No Cry; One Love; Please Don't Rock My Boat; Redemption Song; Small Axe; So Much Trouble In The World; Soul Rebel; Stir It Up; Sun Is Shining; Thank You Lord; Three Little Birds;
Waiting In Vain; Who The Cap Fits; Why Should I;
Book Description
The past fifteen years have seen renewed interest in the civil rights movement. Television documentaries, films and books have brought the struggles into our homes and classrooms once again. New evidence in older criminal cases demands that the judicial system reconsider the accuracy of investigations and legal decisions. Racial profiling, affirmative action, voting districting, and school voucher programs keep civil rights on the front burner in the political arena. In light of this, there are very few resources for teaching the civil rights at the university level. This timely and invaluable book fills this gap. This book offers perspectives on presenting the movement in different classroom contexts; strategies to make the movement come alive for students; and issues highlighting topics that students will find appealing. Including sample syllabi and detailed descriptions from courses that prove effective, this work will be useful for all instructors, both college and upper level high school, for courses in history, education, race, sociology, literature and political science.
Book Description
A celebration of the great songsmith's political engagement.
"Keep a good head and carry a light bulb."—Bob Dylan's response to the question "What is your advice for young people?", London 1962.
Bob Dylan's lyrics are at once abstruse and evocative, urgent and timeless. But, as Mike Marqusee's compelling new book makes clear, behind the anarchy and playfulness of Dylan's imagery lie meanings that are often highly charged with political and social concerns.
It was blues and folk songs that first led Bob Dylan to politics. But it was politics that unlocked his own astonishing songwriting ability, evidenced by dazzling responses in the early 1960s to the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. Marqusee traces the young song-writer's subsequent reluctance to be pigeonholed, his rejection of "protest," and his turn to electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He shows the way folk tradition, modernism, and commercial popular culture are sublimely fused in Dylan's masterworks of the mid-1960s, notably on the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and discusses the artist's quest for American identity—amid the continuing carnage in Vietnam and growing chaos at home—in The Basement Tapes.
Following his acclaimed study of Muhammad Ali, Redemption Song, Mike Marqusee again demonstrates an engaging ability to fuse biography and politics, storytelling and original insight.
Customer Reviews:
a history book that tells you how the people feel.......2007-04-03
In his Chronicles, Dylan states that he has never read a history book that tells how people feel. Chimes of Freedom, however, is such a history book. In researching Dylan, this is by far the best source I have come across, but more than that, Chimes of Freedom relates the brutal realities of civil rights oppression in the South of the 60's. Marqusee analyzes not just Dylan but also the incredible struggles that the singer witnessed, causing the reader to feel the same anger and sorrow that these protesters felt.
excellent.......2006-07-06
This is an excellent book. It is especially reccomended for serious Dylan fans. very easy to read, incredibly insightful. Tremendous assimilation of history and music. if this was a test the author would get a 96%. he rarely gets it wrong. one of the best dylan books that i have ever read.
What a remarkable book.......2004-08-25
I have been waiting a for a book with this level of political sophistication for a long time. It's finally here. Marqusee sees the politics in America in the 1960s in its complexity, and Dylan's music equally so. As a result, he avoids the cliches about both and teases out many new insights and comments. Bravo! An especially important book for young activists. Marqusee clears away the romance and the clutter of those years so that you can better appreciate the difficulty of struggle today. And at the same time, he clears the way for you to find companionship in Dylan's music from that time.
Freedom Chimes.......2004-06-25
This is the third book on Dylan I have read in the last couple of weeks, and by coincidence they all take quite different approaches that serve to sharpen the contrasts in how Dylan's lyrics are interpreted. The first two, by Marqusee and Ricks are essentially contextualist. Ricks' context is the canon of Anglo Saxon poetry and literature which, I presume, he thinks enables us to understand better Dylan's lyrics (his choice of what is great poetry in Dylan is eccentric). Marqusee takes a different form of contextualism, and sees the events, political and social as providing the context for understanding Bob Dylan's lyrics. I found his elaboration on political events and movements extremely illuminating, but at times they were not wholly integrated and appeared instead as juxapostions against the lyrics rather than serving to clarify them. The third book is on both Dylan and Leonard Cohen (much underrated in the States but huge in Europe). The author, I see, has also edited a book with Gary Browning due out in November 2004 with a similr title to Marqusee's The Political Art of Bob Dylan). Boucher in his Dylan and Cohen appraises the two types of contextualism just mentioned, and with reference to the statements of Dylan and Cohen show how referents often serve to obscure rather than illuminate meaning. In many of the songs it is the images rather than the meanings that are evocative. Here a prime example would be 'Desolution Row'. Anyway, all three books are well worth a read.
Vanguard Into Rearguard.......2003-10-06
In "Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art," Mike Marqusee treats us to a full-on analysis of the cultural, political and historical significance of Bob Dylan in the context of the early-to-mid 60s when Dylan was at the height of his powers. But even more, he shows how Dylan, at the vanguard of the social protest movement, was in the vanguard of the next development as well -- the turn away from the mass politics of the left, the social patriotism of Guthrie, toward the private politics of expressive individualism, the search for "authenticity" in an increasingly inauthentic world. With psychological nuance and sensitivity, he explores Dylan's defensiveness and arrogance, his sometimes convoluted and confused politics and his attempts to cope with nearly overwhelming fame and notoriety in the midst of social and political turmoil.
Essentially, Dylan is the core around which the story of the decline of the American Left is told. Marqusee provides insight in the factors that gave rise to the sense of hopefulness of the early 60s, a hopefulness that could not be sustained by most of the new white college kid converts to the civil rights and other social justice movements. Dense, packed with insight, this is a cogent corrective to the many misconceptions and platitudes that have come to describe this turbulent time in American history. In Marqusee's reading of the time, in the contextual backdrops he weaves, rescues a complex era from the oversimplifications of the media, e.g., the Woodstock Nation.
Emblematic of Dylan's break with the Old Left was his adoption of rock and roll instrumentation at Newport. Launched into new sonic and social spaces, Dylan cleared the way for all kinds of experimentation, the explosion of creativity that ensued in such performers as Hendrix. But in the explosion, Marqusee insists, the consumer state, sniffing around for new game, created an entire new marketing segment out of the excitement and wild extravagance of the ethos of personal freedom. Soon, he shows, protests were uncool. The struggle did not provide the instant gratification that young white America had come to expect from the consumer state. Soon, the enormous wave of civil disobedience and protest against the Vietnam War subsided into the cynical selling of rebellious culture and its many accoutrements.
Marqusee suggests, perhaps a bit too patly, that consumer culture and its mechanisms swamped the last vestiges of leftist New Deal politics. Still, he convincingly defends the notion that Dylan after emulating the social patriotism of the folk-singers in the generation before his, began to form a more profound and more withering critique of the "system," a critique which eventually pitted him against the Old Left, who still believed in the possiblity of the Popular Front. Eventually, the New Left took up the notion of a revolution in consciousness as the only way to defeat the Establishment -- and as they did mimicked Dylan's search for the authentic. A vexed notion, authenticity, as Marqusee notes, all the more sought after as it become harder and harder to find in the midst of the expolsion of the consumer state. He shows us this tension in Dylan, who, after his early anthemic songs in the style of Guthrie, moved toward the imagistic, the satirical, the non-sequitur, the private hipster moves of Kerouac and Ginsberg and their in-crowd critique of (consumer) society as a way to distance himself from the Seeger and Baez crowd.
Another strategy Marqusee employs well is the examination of Dylan's evolution against other music and other performers. He does a particularly insightful job with Curtis Mayfield, showing how the music of protest came from gospel and was given new life by artists like Mayfield. He also contrasts Phil Ochs with Dylan, who remained until the end a protest singer in the more generally accepted mold. In the epilogue, he cannily examines Dylan's decline through the rise of one of John Hammonds "New Dylan" -- Springsteen. He suggest that Springsteen started out by aping the moves of the imagistic, stream-of-consciousness era Dylan, then, after studying some history and the some of the roots of popular music, began to align himself with the older stream of social protest music in the "Tom Joad" album.
No book of left social criticism is able to avoid mentioning Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Thus Marquesee cites Adorno's views on popular music in his analysis. Quite rightly disputes Adorno's views on the exploitation by capital of "popular" music in the case of early Dylan, but suggests Adorno's view of the impossibility of popular music remaining truly of the people in a consumer state. Adorno's grand and paranoid theories still a bit redolent of the determinism of his Marxist heritage, but there is more than a little truth in his theory. Still, more to my taste are the citations from Adorno's sometime friend and colleague, Walter Benjamin. More Dylanesque, more elliptical, more paradoxical, less programmatic.
Dylan, an unwilling accomplice of the exploitation of rebel culture, troubled by his fame and its implications, grew conservative after "John Wesley Harding." His great period came to an end just as the mass of young people began to experience the 60s, to "question authority." Marqusee has gone deep into this chaotic, watershed time, and pulled from it through his examination of Dylan, an historical and cultural vision which is bracing, balanced, and thoughtful. Incidentally, a good companion read is "Power and Protest" by Jeremi Suri which shows how the leaders of both the free and unfree worlds after promising good times in the late 50s and early 60s, all moved toward conservative agendas in the face of a protest movement among youth, a movement in some ways fueled by the grand gestures and promises made -- "The New Frontier" and "The Great Leap Forward" -- and upon which they had not been able to deliver during the nuclear stalemate.
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- A Song of Despair that helped end lynching
- A powerful book about a powerful song.
- an ACCURATE account
- HOW COULD A SMART LAWYER WRITE SUCH A DUMB BOOK?
- Gee Baby, Ain't Margolick Good To Us
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Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
David Margolick
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Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song
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Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday
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An Equal Music
ASIN: 0762406771 |
Amazon.com
Our image of Billie Holiday is that of the elegant and melancholy jazz singer known for her haunting voice and immortal classics like "Lady Sings the Blues" and "My Man." But there was another song she performed that stood out in her repertoire: "Strange Fruit," a disturbing and impressionistic elegy to lynched black men in the South. Now, for the first time, New York Times and Vanity Fair contributor David Margolick uncovers the extraordinary history of this important American composition that few singers dare to perform to this day. For Margolick, "'Strange Fruit' defies easy musical categorization and has slipped between the cracks of academic study. It's too artsy to be folk music, too explicitly political and polemical to be jazz. Surely no song in American history has ever been guaranteed to silence an audience or to generate such discomfort."
Margolick reconstructs that discomfort when he details that fateful night in 1939 when Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit" at New York's Cafe Society. He also writes about the song's composer, Abel Meeropol (who later adopted the sons of spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). For the author, "Strange Fruit" was a protest act on par with Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus years later, and he notes the influence the song has had on poets, singers, and writers as diverse as Maya Angelou, Cassandra Wilson, and Natalie Merchant. What David Margolick proves in this small but important book is that art can indeed move people in ways nothing else can. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Customer Reviews:
A Song of Despair that helped end lynching.......2001-12-27
How was lynching ever respectable? Why did nightclub owners discourage Billie Holiday from singing this protest song against the murder of innocent Blacks? How did this powerful, somber song become Time Magazine's Best Song of the Century?
David Margolick traces the history of Strange Fruit from a forbidden, banned song to a celebrated cry for civil rights in a concise style. Performers, club owners, reviewers, and activists are extensively quoted - and the differing perceptions allowed to exist next to each other without comment.
This facinating book should be carried in all public school libraries, read in courses on American music. It's a fine addition to the scholarship on the civil rights movement too.
I do have, however, one serious criticism. Somehow, even if in just a single sentence, Margolick should have noted the irony of sensitive, gentle progressive defending Stalin's regime. Several key people, great souls, involved in the early civil rights movement - including the songwriter of Strange Fruit - were members of the Communist Party during the Stalin's dictatorship. They were outraged at the lack of freedom for blacks in America, and their criticisms of Jim Crowe laws were totally accurate. I wish, however, that Margolick had at least mentioned - once - their blindness toward the brutal rule of Stalin in the USSR.
The vast, vast majority of these progressive activists recognized their mistake, and their committment to the Bill of Rights and individual freedom only increased.
Despite this minor criticism, this is a fantastic book that documents the great change in American cultural norms over the last 50 years.It's hard to imagine a time when Billie Holiday and Strange Fruit would be banned and lynching accepted as a Southern tradition.
Thank God for progress!
A powerful book about a powerful song........2001-08-24
It may seem odd to devote an entire book to a single song, but if ever a song demanded such an exploration, itÕs Billie HolidayÕs recording of Strange Fruit. Almost everyone thinks itÕs brilliant, yet few people listen to it often. Holiday makes this depiction of a lynching so real that the song is physically painful to listen to. To this day, itÕs rarely played on jazz-formatted radio stations. ItÕs too disturbing. IÕve always wondered how Billie Holiday managed to get it recorded in 1939. Did radio stations play it? And where did she sing it? I simply could not imagine Lady Day, with a gardenia in her hair, singing such a horrifying song to people in a nightclub while they sipped martinis. And if she did, how did her audience react? The fascinating thing about this book is that it not only answered my questions, it also raised many issues I hadnÕt thought about. David Margolick has collected comments and anecdotes about Strange Fruit and HolidayÕs performance from a wide variety of sources Ð musicians who worked with her, people who saw her perform the song at different time in her life, and contemporary singers who have recorded the song or performed it. What they say raises a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between art and politics, as well as the relationship between an artist and her art. The most fascinating Ð and shocking Ð thing to me was the number of people who worked with Billie Holiday who insist that her performance was a fluke, that she did not understand what she was singing. She was an uneducated, not terribly intelligent woman, her "friends" say, and didnÕt even know the meaning of the songÕs words. To anyone who has ever heard the song, that suggestion seems insane. The words are powerful, but it is what Billie Holiday does with them that makes this the most disturbing recording ever made. It is clearly a song with a deep, personal meaning for her. In the end, after reading the book, and hearing about how she performed the song throughout her life (sometimes sharing it with an audience she thought would be sympathetic, but just as often using it as a slap in the face to an audience she felt did not respect her), you canÕt help but see that what makes HolidayÕs recording so personal, so deep, is that for her it wasnÕt only a song about lynching, it was a protest against all kinds of racism, including the racism of dismissing a brilliant artist as one more empty-headed "girl singer." Margolick makes a strong case that it was the first cry of the civil rights movement that began more than a decade later.
an ACCURATE account.......2001-01-31
This thought-provoking and well-researched book moves beyond the racism and anti-Semitism that have fueled myths, misconceptions, and inaccuracies about its subject for years. Unfortunately, we see many of those those inaccuracies lingering still in a number of popular forums. Do not be duped; read for yourself and learn the truth:
1) Lewis Allan is a PSEUDONYM for Abel Meeropol, a well-known and well-regarded high school English teacher and composer. He also wrote "The House I Live In" (music by Earl Robinson) which Frank Sinatra later made famous. Allan and Meeropol are THE SAME PERSON.
2) Meeropol and his wife LEGALLY adopted the Rosenberg children after their parents were executed and remained their legal guardians ever since. Both Rosenberg sons, Robert and Michael (who use the last name Meeropol) love and revere the Meeropols and consider them their parents.
3) The money to support the Rosenberg children was not raised by the Meeropols, but by a foundation, whose trustees included Shirley Graham Dubois, wife of civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. The foundation existed PRIOR to the Meeropols' adoption of the children.
HOW COULD A SMART LAWYER WRITE SUCH A DUMB BOOK?.......2000-12-20
Stanford Law School educated lawyer David Margolick has appointed himself shyster for one of New York City's sleeziest historical figures of the 1930's and 1940's, Abel Meeropol, the guy who claimed he wrote southern author Lewis Allan's famous poem titled STRANGE FRUIT ("Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood on the root," etc.)
It's a poem about a lynched Black man put to bad music (probably by Meeropol) and made famous in torch song renditions by Billie Holliday and Eartha Kitt (and others).
The audacious Meeropol was no poet, but claimed he was, and even claimed copyright to Allan's poem. The fact is, Meeropol was a famous hustler, later noted for offering "shelter" to the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenburg and tearfully raising money to support his "cause" of "saving" the Rosenburg children (a New York judge put a stop to all this).
Mr. Margolick's book is dull and poorly written, claiming sympathy for Billie Holiday and lynched Blacks in the South, but actually dripping with Crocodile tears and cynicism.
It's amazing that a piece of crap like this could get into print, but the "Running Press" of Philadelphia has turned the trick, and offers the book for $16.95 ($25.95 in Canada). Don't buy it or read it. It's awful.
Gee Baby, Ain't Margolick Good To Us.......2000-08-08
This warm-hearted generous book captures the bittersweet beauty of Lady and all of her glory. In concise, translucent prose that sparkles, David Margolick tells of the song that forces Americans to face the stark and shared history that brings together black and white, jew and gentile. By honestly facing the wounds of racism and bigotry, prejudice and betrayal, Margolick offers a book that refuses to accept despair and embraces Lady's music as a noble expression of hope born out of pain.
Book Description
This new combined edition of We Shall Overcome and Freedom Is A Constant Struggle weaves together the leadsheets of 115 songs, 135 moving documentary photos, and stirring firsthand accounts. Grouped together in chapters on each of the key stages of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, they create a stunning vision of this critical moment in world history. Includes an introduction by the editors, Guy and Candie Carawan. Arranged chronologically, fully indexed. 312 pages.
Customer Reviews:
Buy two!.......2000-04-15
Anyone interested in promoting social justice through song needs this book, and at all times a spare one stuck in the guitar case or piano bench because you'll want to pass it on to others. It contains 115 songs (mostly melody lines and guitar chords); 135 crisply reproduced documentary photos from the civil rights movement and dozens of first-hand accounts from people who were there. In many cases, the writer, arranger or discoverer of the song provides the background notes. There is a companion CD by Folkways records with the same name that contains about 1/5 of the songs; it makes a nice set. Every library should have this book - what a vital way to teach history! Editors Guy and Candy Carawan are resident musicians at the Highlander Center and were in the center leading the music at many of the events discussed.
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Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
Mary King
Manufacturer: William Morrow & Co
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ASIN: 0688082513 |
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Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America
Robert James Branham , and
Stephen J. Hartnett
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0195137418 |
Book Description
Although it isn't the official national anthem, America may be the most important and interesting patriotic song in our national repertoire. Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America is a celebration and critical exploration of the complicated musical, cultural and political roles played by the song America over the past 250 years. Popularly known as My Country 'Tis of Thee and as God Save the King/Queen before that this tune has a history as rich as the country it extols. In Sweet Freedom's Song, Robert Branham and Stephen Hartnett chronicle this song's many incarnations over the centuries. Colonial Americans, Southern slaveowners, abolitionists, temperance campaigners and labor leaders, among others, appropriated and adapted the tune to create anthems for their own struggles. Because the song has been invoked by nearly every grassroots movement in American history, the story of America offers important insights on the story of democracy in the United States. An examination of America as a historical artifact and cultural text, Sweet Freedoms Song is a reflection of the rebellious spirit of Americans throughout our nations history. The late Robert James Branham and his collaborator, Stephen Hartnett, have produced a thoroughly-researched, delightfully written book that will appeal to scholars and patriots of all stripes.
Amazon.com
Amit Chaudhuri's first book to be published in the United States comprises three short novels and is a masterpiece of the telling detail--in one paragraph he accomplishes what might take other writers entire volumes. Consider, for example, this description of family life in "A Strange and Sublime Address":
Monday morning came like a fever. Chhotomama would be at the dining-table, eating a rapid meal of dal, fish, and rice, trying to avoid chewing as much of it as possible before he rushed to work. Then he would rush upstairs where a pair of polished black shoes would be waiting for him like a long-promised gift. He would spend five minutes persuading his feet to enter the shoes, or the shoes to swallow his feet.... Over and over again he would shout "I'm late!" in the classic manner of the man crying "Fire!" or "Timber!" or "Eureka!" while Saraswati and Mamima scuttled around him like frightened birds.
The plot of "A Strange and Sublime Address" is slight--a young boy spends his summer with relatives in Calcutta--and consists mainly of a series of episodes strung together. But the characters are so lovingly limned and the places so intimately described that not even a one-way ticket to India could rival Chaudhuri's rendering.
He works similar magic on Oxford and Bombay in the second novel, "Afternoon Raag." Again, the story is almost inconsequential: a young Indian student at Oxford must choose between two women. What's really important here, however, are the character's memories of his music teacher back in Bombay; his mother's morning rituals; his father clipping his fingernails onto an old copy of The Times of India. Likewise, in the third novel, "Freedom Song," plot takes a back seat to the delicate workings of familial relationships as two clans attempt to marry off a "problem" relative. What makes these three short novels so satisfying is the fact that the author's remarkable sensibility is more than matched by his literary skillfulness. For readers in love with language, Freedom Song is the answer to a prayer. --Alix Wilber
Book Description
"An immensely gifted writer....Crammed with breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces, and melancholy grace notes." --The New York Times Book Review
Freedom Song--which collects three of Chaudhuri's novels--celebrates the rhythms of modern India. A boy's visit with relatives conjures the melancholy comforts of family. An Indian student at an English university contemplates the conflicted relationship between an immigrant and his homeland. And the task of marrying off a "problem" son illuminates the complex community of cultures that is modern Calcutta.
Chaudhuri's novels offer simple plots that unfold into dramas of profound emotional resonance. And in prose that has won Chaudhuri comparisons to the master stylists of this century but that emerges as fiercely his own,
Freedom Song announces a young writer of extraordinary gifts.
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful Prose but No Plot.......2005-06-11
I picked up this book b/c I enjoy reading about life in other cultures. I agree with the other reviews that his writing is beautiful and descriptive, but there is no real plot. You can only read about every minute detail of a house or a typical day for so long until you want some sort of conflict or even character development. It is written in third person, so you never know what's going on inside their mind. There is no bonding with any character. I agree with the review that says it's just a glimpse into their everyday life that is disguised behind beautiful prose. I did not finish this book.
Insight into The Indian Life and Soul.......2005-04-07
Chaudhuri has written a rich and earthy rendering of life in India in this work (I enjoyed these two short stories much more than the tale set in England, which to me lacked the energy and humor of the other two).
He uses a beautiful, vibrant and complex fabric of language in rendering his characters and their lives, rather like the traditional "Sari" worn by women of his native land.
While he pokes plenty of fun at the the idosyncracies and the travails of his characters and of the life there, it is without malice, a gentle prodding, that of a fond and familiar friend.
Worthy of the term "literature", definitely recommended!
Bengali schmaltz leaves bad aftertaste...........2002-04-13
Chaudhuri's prose may be poetic but it is also insidiously sentimental. A saccharin-sweet view of Calcutta that leaves you craving for something more substantial. For great Indian writing try the salty, wry humour of Rushdie or Arundhati Roy's beautiful 'God of Small Things', a book that is not afraid to examine the darker side of post-colonial India.
Picturesque.......2002-03-01
It's poetic, it paints a picture... but it doesn't have much of a plot. How's the for some "p" words? I enjoyed it and Chaudhuri does have an eloquent turn of phrase, but I'm still kind of wondering what the point was. It seemed more like snapshots of the lives of Indian families than actual novellas. Freedom Song is a collection of three novellas: A Strange and Sublime Address, An Afternoon Raag, and Freedom Song. I dunno... maybe they're all just too smart for me (that is entirely possible).
Poetic..........2001-11-06
While I thouroughly enjoyed the poetic prose of this novel, I was a little perplexed by its seeming lack of plot. No doubt the descriptions are awesome and Chaudhuri has a mean turn of phrase, but I kept waiting for the point to come across and, for me, it never seemed to. It's beautiful, but I like a little more action.
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- Find It, Fix It, Flip It!: Make Millions in Real Estate--One House at a Time
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Bob Marley
