jazzy_dave | Entries tagged with bpooks

Rupi Kaur "Milk And Honey" (Andrews McMeel Publishing)

Rupi Kaur was just 21 when she wrote and illustrated this collection of poetry, somehow managing to do the impossible and selling millions of copies of a genre that typically doesn't often top the bestseller charts.

Milk and Honey is a raw, honest and gutsy collection of poems about abuse, falling in love, having your heart broken and healing. I enjoyed the sections on falling in love and breaking up the most - for those of us who passed out of our teens and twenties quite some time ago, it was an enjoyable reminder of the passion that burns so fiercely at that point in life, when sexual relationships are all consuming and break ups so terribly hurtful and destructive (I'm not suggesting break ups aren't upsetting at any stage in life, but there's a particular rawness to those early breakups when you're just discovering life and trying to figure out who you are).

your name is
the strongest
positive and negative
connotation in any language
it either lights me up or
leaves me aching for days

Bam! I'm rocketed straight back to the late eighties and thoughts of an ex who sent me head and heart spinning in all sorts of great and awful directions.

I don't know why
I split myself open
for others knowing
sewing myself up
hurts this much
afterward

I loved this collection. It's so raw, so open, so painfully, brutally recognisable to anyone who remembers the immense joy and pain of falling in and out of love for the first time or even second time.

Michael De Koningh "Young, Gifted, and Black: The Story of Trojan Records" (Sanctuary)

As the title makes clear, this book is a history of the Trojan record label (and its many offspring) in the UK. It's a lot more than that, though, and some of the extras make it excellent value for the record collector. Over half of the book's 300+ pages are devoted to a description of all of Trojan's many labels and a complete discography of everything issued on them - and indications of which catalogue numbers were never used. There's also a 12-track CD containing some excellent material that rarely shows up on typical compilations.

The first 100 or so pages contain the history itself, and this is where the book is both valuable and flawed. Much of the content derives from interviews conducted by one or the other author, and the structure of the book lurches between following the thread of what a single interviewee discussed and taking a more thematic or chronological approach. This is often extremely frustrating. As the narrative lurches backward and forwards one ends up reading a lot of interesting anecdotes but struggling to maintain a coherent picture of what's happening.

De Koningh gives credit in the acknowledgments to Mike Atherton for improving his prose. I wish he had worked on it for longer - and I hate to think what the text was like before he improved it. Once you get past this difficulty, though, this is a well-researched, informative, and entertaining story of Trojan's part in bringing reggae to the UK.

Current Mood: recumbent
Crossposts: https://davesmusictank.livejournal.com/5197732.html

Juliet Gardiner (Editor), Neil Wenborn (Editor) - "The "History Today" Companion to British History" (Collins And Brown)

The fact that I still love good reference books is the reason to highlight this one. This is one I regularly like to dip in to.

Six British historians contribute to a comprehensive dictionary which not only is a reference work for events, people and places from 43 AD but also acknowledges that history is as much about the writing of what happened as what actually did happen. It also includes information on historical concepts and controversy. The contributors are Dr David Bates (University of Wales, College of Cardiff), John Gillingham (London School of Economics), Dr Diarmaid McCulloch (University of Bristol and University College London), Joanna Innes (Somerville College, Oxford), Dr David Englander (Open University) and Dr John Stevenson (Worcester College, Oxford).