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April 23, 2021

George Ernsberger - Columnist
Posted 4/23/21

THE MUSICAL HUMAN: A HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH by Michael Spitzer (Bloomsbury). The subtitle is a clue to the author's subtle wit. Of course his book is a history of music; yet it really is deep and …

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April 23, 2021

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THE MUSICAL HUMAN: A HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH by Michael Spitzer (Bloomsbury). The subtitle is a clue to the author's subtle wit. Of course his book is a history of music; yet it really is deep and broad enough to deserve the breadth of that boast. This is yet another history of—well, not the world, if it doesn't attend to nations or wars, right?—but humanity, beginning even before language; he finds evidence for attention to human-made and human-pleasing sounds that early. It comes forward, of course: makes real and clear the profound differences among the musics of India, China, Southeast Asia, and still more, as well as that of Europe and the West—as sounds organized and meant to be beautiful, but also as communication. Spitzer really is talking to people interested in how humanity got to be the way it is, generally; but neither he (I suspect) nor I expects readers who don't care about music to pick up his book. Still, nobody who does will be other than grateful, or less than somewhat wiser about more than music, for time spent with it. He clearly loves music for itself, by the way: music criticism is not the book's point, but in occasionally reflecting on the particular music I know well enough to judge him with any confidence, Western classical (some), jazz, varieties of pop and folk, rock (a little)—he's astute, specific, and right.

STARGAZER by Anne Hillerman (Harper). The new (sixth) Leaphorn and Chee and Manuelito mystery, of course, and surely by now I needn't say much more than: the creator's daughter and her successor novels are absolutely worthy of her inheritance; this is rich stuff, live and continuing to develop, in this one to be sure.

THE SHOOTING AT CHATEAU ROCK by Martin Walker (Knopf). A Bruno, Chief of Police novel, so another mystery with distinctly ethnic flavor; but then, other flavors too; this is France—the Dordogne, a legendarily beautiful, pastoral region—but to the point: another author and policeman that the column doesn't so much favor as revere.

I HAVE BEEN BURIED UNDER YEARS OF DUST by Valerie Gilpeer and Emily Grodin (Morrow). A mother and daughter memoir; the title is honest, in its poetic way—Emily Grodin is unmistakably a poet of real gifts—but it suggests dreary or grim, and their book is none of that. She's a college student, now; she never used words at all, aloud or in writing, until she was 25 years old, having lived all that time (and still, of course, it doesn't forget you and wander off) with what's known as nonverbal autism. This is a new way into and reflection on what was once an utterly alien (to the rest of us) way of being a person.

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