MarysLibrary

Sondheim's Finishing the Hat

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is nobody like Sondheim. Much as I love Cole Porter and the Rogers and Hart and Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, it's Sondheim who sings to me.

This collection of lyrics to his musicals from West Side Story in 1957 to Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 is enlightening. Sondheim introduces each show, includes the lyrics to songs that were cut, and explains the dynamics between him and the producer, director, writer of the book, choreographer, and composer if he was writing only the lyrics, as in West Side Story. (Apparently Jerome Robbins was the strongest character working on that show and even Leonard Bernstein would sneak out to a bar and line up shots of whisky when Robbins went on a rampage.)

Sondheim is apparently known for writing beautiful songs for failed musicals, such as Merrily We Roll Along, which lasted only 16 performances, and Anyone Can Whistle, which lasted 9, despite its starring Angela Landsbury and Lee Remick. But of course others were enormous hits, like Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Company. My favorite Sondheim show, A Little Night Music, was made into a deplorably weak movie which is unfortunate as most people don't get a chance to see the show on the stage.

The title, Finishing the Hat, is taken from Sunday in the Park With George, which Sondheim discusses in the second of his books of annotated lyrics, Look, I Made a Hat, which covers 1981-2011.

2011  No 141

End of the Year

This year has been an extraordinary one for good books. So rich have been the pickin's that during the summer I got into a reading frenzy and stopped reporting on what I had read. Fortunately, in late July I started writing down (on paper, imagine) when I started and finished the many books I was enjoying so much. In this and following posts I'll at least list the books I've been reading. 

Blackout by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't read time travel books, but . . . yes, this is time travel. Scientists and historians at present-day Oxford are working together to send historians back in time to study the Second World War. But then something goes wrong with the drop off and return sites and the time travelers find themselves stuck in London being bombed every night. They have studied the period during which they expected to be traveling so they know where the bombs are going to be landing. But when they are forced to remain longer they are just as clueless as the rest of the city population about where tonight's bombs will land. And how are they going to get back to the 21st century?

2011  No 138

What You Should Know About Politics...But Don't: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues by Jessamyn Conrad
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book purports to be an unbiased look at politics and to describe what each side says about various issues. It is not nonpartisan. It is biased to the left. And it doesn't even do a very good job of explaining why those on the left believe what they do. A great disappointment.

2011  No 139

After America by Mark Steyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mark Steyn is an outrageous and outrageously funny writer whose books will rate five stars with people who love apocalyptic warnings of civilization in decline and no stars at all with anybody left of Sarah Palin. Underneath all the slashing rhetoric is a good deal of common sense, however, and nobody is more agile with a pun.

2011  No 140

The War of the World

The War of the World by Niall Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Niall Ferguson approaches history from an economic point of view. This gives his books something most histories of the 20th century do not have. His research is careful and he thinks about things in a new way. This was one of the best books I've read in the last year. Here's what Publisher's Weekly has to say:

Why, if life was improving so rapidly for so many people at the dawn of the 20th century, were the next hundred years full of brutal conflict? Ferguson has a relatively simple answer: ethnic unrest is prone to break out during periods of economic volatility-booms as well as busts. When they take place in or near areas of imperial decline or transition, the unrest is more likely to escalate into full-scale conflict. This compelling theory is applicable to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated against Bosnians, but the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's analysis is devoted to the two world wars and the fate of the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe. His richly informed analysis overturns many basic assumptions. For example, he argues that England's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 didn't lead to WWII, but was a misinformed response to a war that had started as early as 1935. But with Ferguson's claims about "the descent of the West" and the smaller wars in the latter half of the century tucked away into a comparatively brief epilogue, his thoughtful study falls short of its epic promise.

The book was written in conjunction with a BBC TV production which I have not seen.

2011 No 137

Bring Up the Bodies

Here's the prospective cover for Bring Up the Bodies, the new Hilary Mantel novel, second in the Wolf Hall Trilogy. I can hardly wait!

Demand

Demand: Creating what People love before they know they want it by Adrian J. Slywotzky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was enticed to read this book by an article in the November issue of Atlantic magazine, "The Quiet Health-Care Revolution." The article describes an HMO-like medical practice in southern California, now spreading to Arizona and elsewhere in the southwest, called Caremore. It enrolls only people on Medicare and it practices preventive medicine.

For example, if a person has congestive heart failure, Caremore provides them with a scale that transmits their weight to the clinic every morning. A sudden weight gain alerts them to a possible problem and then call the client and send a car to take them to the clinic. A diabetic with a small cut on a toe calls them and a car comes to take him to a diabetes care clinic where the cut is carefully cleaned and bandaged. He returns to the clinic every other day until the cut is healed.

With these preventive measures Caremore cut the number of amputations for people with diabetes by 60%. They have sharply cut the number of hospitalizations for congestive heart disease and the follow-on stay in a nursing facility to regain strength. They visit clients' homes to help make it safer to get around and they counsel people about diet and exercise.

Caremore has cut costs dramatically and Adrian Slywotzky, the author of Demand, predicts it's the future of medical care for the elderly in America. This small practice has provided services that have created a demand.

Demand masquerades as a business/economics book, and it does talk about Netflix and Kindle and Pret a Manger and Tetra Pak. But it also relates how symphony orchestras in the US are dramatically increasing the number of their core subscribers and how Teach for America is training Ivy League graduates to teach successfully in some of the worst schools in the US.

Slywotzky's last chapter is the heart of the book. Where, he asks, are the new products, the entire new industries going to come from? Who is going to create the demand for things we don't even know we are going to need? We used to have Bell Labs where a trio of engineers created a gizmo they called a transistor which went on to change our entire world. He talks about ARPA where the scientists did strange but sometimes successful experiments and developed something they called the Internet and invited everybody to join.

Bell Labs and the RCA lab and XEROX lab are much smaller than they used to be and ARPA sticks pretty much to military research, most of which is classified. He does see good things, specifically a very clever robot, coming out of the MIT lab and SRI is still doing "pure" research, with scientists working on inventions they see no immediate use for. Nobody saw the use for that transistor either until they got to putting a lot of them on a little chip. The MIT lab is results oriented. Their motto is Demo or Die, so if you develop an idea for interactive wallpaper you need to produce some of this lively wallpaper. I got the impression someone has done so.

But the problem remains, where are the scientists of tomorrow going to come from? China, the author tells us, has more honor students than the US has students. (And no grade inflation.) They could not keep these labs going without foreign students and other immigrants. Our best students in the US are going into business and finance. How are we going to steer them into science which provides the fuel for the business without which those financiers would have little to do.

2011  No 136

Quotable

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People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

        - Malcolm Muggeridge

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