User Profile

J. Martin

gyokusai@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 1 month ago

All my snark is sincere.

Writer, Ph.D., Professor of Game Design. Not necessarily in that order. Also gyokusai on LibraryThing since 2006.

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J. Martin's books

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Ennio Morricone: Ennio Morricone (Hardcover, 2019, Oxford University Press) 5 stars

A Thoroughly Enchanting Conversation

5 stars

A conversation between Ennio Morricone and Alessandro De Rosa, two highly educated, perceptive, and sensitive composers, whose wide breath of topics is matched by each topic’s depth of detail and insight. Whether you come for Morricone’s biography, or the stories behind his “applied” (cinema) and “absolute” music, or the history and art of composing for the cinema, or the techniques of scoring and producing, or Morricone’s compositional techniques beyond theme, or his compositional methods from serialism and beyond, this conversation will touch upon it sooner or later in highly rewarding ways.

reviewed Deutschland 1923 by Volker Ullrich

Volker Ullrich: Deutschland 1923 (EBook, German language, 2022, C. H. Beck) 2 stars

Gripping But Not Substantial

2 stars

Great read if you want to know what happened in 1923 in Germany, enriched with local color and quotes from newspapers, letters, and diaries from the time. However, don’t expect a scholarly work. There’s no attempt at analysis beyond the obvious; the book doesn’t engage with any previous interpretation or viewpoint; and sometimes it’s even sloppy in ways I regularly object to when marking students’ papers. (E.g., «Bereits nach dreizehn Monaten musste ‹Der Neue Tag› sein Erscheinen einstellen.» Why? Financial trouble? Political trouble? We never know.) (And in case you’re puzzled by the typography: yes, the Munich-based publisher uses Swiss-style instead of German-style guillemets. House style, perhaps.) All in all, Deutschland 1923: Das Jahr am Abgrund is a light read that tells a gripping story, but neither adds a lot of perspective nor ever stops to reflect on its own.