(++++) PIANOS, WITH FEELING

Grieg: Slåtter (Norwegian Peasant Dances), Op. 72; Stimmungen (Moods), Op. 73. John McCabe, piano. SOMM. $18.99.

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Ibert: Petite Suite en 15 Images; Arno Babadjanian: Six Pictures for Piano. Andrey Gugnin, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

Debussy: Préludes pour Piano, Livre II; Chopin: Barcarolle in F-sharp Minor, Op. 60; Joel Feigin: Four Elegies for Piano—In Memoriam Renée Longy. Robert Cassidy, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Nathan Davis: On the Nature of Thingness; Ghostlight; On speaking a hundred names; Phyllis Chen: Hush; Chimera; Beneath a Trace of Vapor; Chen & Davis: Mobius. International Contemporary Ensemble. Starkland. $14.99.

     Grieg was essentially a miniaturist, and as a result was and sometimes still is dismissed as a trifler, or at any rate a composer occupied with trifles. Composer/pianist John McCabe (1939-2015) would have none of that. For him, Grieg was a composer whose fine ear for folk tunes and delicacy of sensibility for their sound led to production of a series of fascinating short works that encapsulated both Norway as a nation and Grieg’s own personality. Indeed, the infrequently heard Slåtter and Stimmungen collections – not so much suites as groups of totally unrelated pieces – have personality aplenty in McCabe’s SOMM disc, a re-release of an old RCA recording dating to 1978. Even at a remove of almost 40 years, these performances glow with warmth (the digital remastering of the original analog recording is excellent) and are so adeptly characterized by McCabe that they will leave listeners unfamiliar with these works wondering why they are not heard and recorded more often. There are 17 Slåtter, in all the forms that Grieg managed to collect: springdans, halling, gangar, march and a couple simply described as “tune.” Originally written for folk instruments such as the hardanger fiddle and goat-horn, these melodies translate beautifully to piano in Grieg’s sensitive arrangements and under McCabe’s skilled hands. They contain surprises, too, such as marches that are anything but martial and dances with rhythms so pronounced that you can practically hear the rough work boots stomping. There are sturdy melodies lasting barely a minute and more-extended, more-developed ones lasting nearly five. There are warmly naïve tunes – and a “Bridal Procession of the Goblins” that begins with wholly unexpected delicacy before becoming more energetic and then ending quietly and sedately. The considerable variety of the melodies makes Slåtter a very winning collection. And Stimmungen, whose seven pieces explore greater emotional depths than do the tunes of Slåtter, also includes numerous folk elements, as well as a moving “Resignation” and  a wholly unexpected “Studie (Hommage à Chopin)” that whisks by in two minutes and shows that Grieg’s skill – and McCabe’s – extended well beyond the requirements of preserving and presenting Norwegian folk melodies.

     The pictures evoked by Grieg’s music are general ones of Norwegian landscapes, unlike the very specific Victor Hartmann works intended to be brought to mind by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Nowadays the Ravel orchestration of this work is more familiar than Mussorgsky’s piano original, but the piano version is enormously effective when played as well as it is by Andrey Gugnin on as new Steinway & Sons CD. There are differences between the piano and Ravel versions of this extended suite-cum-tone-poem – Bydlo has a wholly different effect, for example – and Mussorgsky’s pianistic coloration of the individual segments is quite distinct from Ravel’s, which impressively employs its own sound palette. Gugnin gets both the grandeur and the delicacy of Mussorgsky’s tribute to Hartmann just right, and captures all the humor as well as the seriousness that the composer brought to this variegated work. Furthermore, Gugnin couples the Mussorgsky with two wonderfully apt companion pieces. Ibert’s Petite Suite en 15 Images is also a set of miniatures, offering a neoclassical set of small, disconnected musical scenes – some without a specific program (Ronde and Romance, for example) and some intended to evoke specifics (La machine à coudre, “The Sewing Machine,” for instance). Like Mussorgsky, Ibert includes some humor in his piano suite, but it is as different from Mussorgsky’s as the French personality is from the Russian; indeed, national typecasting is almost inevitable when differences as clear as those between these works emerge. The third work on Gugnin’s CD goes even farther than Ibert’s in the direction of miniatures without specific meaning. Among the Six Pictures by Armenian composer Arno Babadjanian (1921-1983) are a Folksong quite different from any of Grieg’s and a characteristic Sassoun Dance, but the other pieces eschew programmatic significance and simply offer strongly rhythmic and chromatic explorations of piano technique. Colorful and involving, they neatly cap a CD whose pianism and musical creativity are equally captivating.

     Robert Cassidy also offers a mixture of better-known and less-known piano music on a new MSR Classics CD, and here too the combination comes across, for the most part, very well. The major work here is the second book of Debussy’s Préludes pour Piano, whose constantly varying moods Cassidy captures with considerable elegance and skill. He is especially impressive in the pieces requiring a light touch, such as “Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses” and Ondine, and also does a fine job with the miniatures that ooze sadness or at least melancholy, including Feuilles morte and La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune. These are sensitive and often sensuous little works, whose significance Cassidy does not attempt to overstate: they are essentially salon-like impressionistic tidbits that come across all the more effectively when, as here, they are not overplayed or overdone. Cassidy also does a fine job with Chopin’s Op. 60 Barcarolle, whose wistfulness complements the Debussy material to very fine effect. The Debussy and Chopin are thoughtfully, if imperfectly, matched with the Four Elegies of Joel Feigin (born 1951). Written in 1979 and revised in 1986, this work is a tribute to Renée Longy, a Juilliard professor with whom Feigin studied. Although atonal, the elegies revolve around the notes D and A (‘re” and “la” in solfège) as a nod to Longy’s nickname. The music, however, is not especially attractive and does not seem connected in any particularly honorary way with Longy; it would likely have meaning to other Longy students, but for listeners who do not know the subject, it simply sounds a great deal like any other recent piano works. Placed on the CD between the Chopin and Debussy, it certainly provides contrast to both but does not offer any particular insight. Cassidy plays it with care and understanding, but the work itself does not much repay his attentiveness or that of listeners to the CD.

     Whether the works by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen on a new Starkland disc are worthy of attention will depend entirely on whether a listener wants to encounter (and in some instances endure) a series of assertively contemporary pieces that, in effect, require those who hear them to accept the validity of whatever the composers choose to toss about and identify as music. The piano has a role to play here, for sure – several roles, in fact. In Davis’ Ghostlight it is a prepared piano, played (and played with) by Jacob Greenberg. In Chen’s Hush there are two pianos, one played by Chen and the other by Cory Smythe; there are also toy pianos and music boxes that Chen plays (and, again, plays with), all of which makes the work’s title a bit of a misnomer – although the piece itself is interesting and often amusing. Chen also employs musical humor within a strictly contemporary sound world in Chimers, which is written for tuning forks (Eric Lamb); clarinet and toy glockenspiel (Joshua Rubin, who also plays tuning forks); violin (Erik Carlson, who also plays tuning forks); and toy piano (Chen, who also plays, yes, tuning forks). In addition, Smythe plays both toy glockenspiel and tuning forks. This is essentially a work for tuning forks and toy instruments, and sounds about the way you would expect such a piece to sound – which is not necessarily a bad thing. The disc also includes two solo-instrument-with-electronics works: Davis’ On speaking a hundred names for bassoon (Rebekah Heller) and live processing, and Chen’s Beneath a Trace of Vapor for flute (Lamb) and tape. These are self-consciously modernistic in approach and seem designed to stretch the instruments beyond their bounds, as many contemporary composers like to do. There is also a Chen-Davis collaboration called Mobius for music boxes and electronics, performed by Chen, Lamb and Smythe. This is one of those hyper-intellectualized “look how clever I am” pieces: a performer punches a paper scroll for two music boxes; the scroll runs right-side-up through one music box and then connects as a Möbius strip to run upside-down through the other. All these pieces appear on the CD prior to the longest work on the disc, Davis’ On the Nature of Thingness, a song cycle (with soprano Tony Arnold) that features a very wide variety of mostly percussive instruments (jaw harp, toy piano, bass drum, vibraphone) as well as violin, cello, acoustic and classical guitars, mandolin, bassoon, bass clarinet and more. The work is so hopelessly over-intellectualized that one can imagine Anna Russell wryly exclaiming, as she once did of “competitive” Wagner singing, “Oh, it’s terrific!” The level of abstraction of On the Nature of Thingness is extreme – the whole thing, err, piece ends with lines from Italo Calvino about making “some things with things…an outside with an inside in it.” This is really performance art – the International Contemporary Ensemble includes a lighting designer – and might make an interesting DVD. But as music, or what passes for music, it is hopelessly self-referential, self-involved and self-important. Thanks mainly to some of the humor of some of Chen’s pieces, this is a (+++) release – even though several works on it deserve a (++) rating for listeners not automatically and instinctively enamored of anything that deems itself super-with-it and oh-so-modern.

(++++) TRANSFORMATIONS

Where Did All the Dinos Go? By Jim Benton. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $7.99.

Mighty Truck. By Chris Barton. Illustrated by Troy Cummings. Harper. $17.99.

     The way things change and adapt is fascinating to children, who are going through changes and adaptations themselves every day. This helps make books about changes fun, especially when the authors pile plenty of humor into them. Jim Benton’s brand of amusement shows up, among many other places, in the board book called Where Did All the Dinos Go? This is not a serious question about real-world dinosaurs, of course, beyond the passing comment at the start that “some say they vanished long ago.” Benton’s dinosaurs are cartoonish, big-eyed, and “could be blue with lots of spots,/ or red and green with polka dots.” And they blend skillfully with human beings, but not so skillfully that kids reading the book won’t be able to find them. For example, there is one saying “Yee-haw!” and dressed in cowboy gear, but you would think someone might notice the green skin, bugged-out eyes and huge teeth. Nope. Even more amusingly, there is a city scene showing people walking along a sidewalk, and there in the group is someone (or something) that is green and has a Triceratops-like head, and another someone (or something) that is purple and whose neck and tail are as long as people’s bodies – both the dinos smiling happily and meandering along in human clothing. “Dinos will not bother you,” Benton assures kids, and in fact they can make good playmates if, like the children at the end of the book, you just agree to share your ice-cream cones with them. Benton’s silliness here has none of the snark that is his trademark in books such as his Happy Bunny greeting-card sendups. This is a nice book, and thus not entirely Benton-ish – but the ways it shows dinosaurs changing so they can move freely among humans is Benton-ish by being both funny and amusingly offbeat.

     The transformation in Chris Barton’s Mighty Truck is the opposite of unconventional: it is the super-familiar one of an ordinary character given super powers through some mysterious event or other. In this case, the empowering event happens at a truck wash – the story is about a truck, after all. The truck’s name is Clarence, and he really enjoys getting dirty, “really wheely dirty,” and eating doughnuts. Clarence’s boss at the work site demands that the super-filthy truck get washed off before starting the day’s job, so Clarence obediently goes to the automatic truck wash, where he is in the middle of being cleaned up when a thunderstorm brings lightning that strikes the wash and makes Clarence “really wheely powerful.” Troy Cummings’ illustrations fit the superhero-style story beautifully, and the contrast between humble and dirty Clarence and transformed Mighty Truck is among Cummings’ best. Clarence comes out of the truck wash brightly shining and with wheels taller than the rest of his truck body – plus an “MT” logo on his door and a couple of gold tailfin-like decorations that make it look as if he is wearing a cape. Mighty Truck is a homage, one of many, to the original Superman comics, from those cape-like fins to the timid truck’s name (Clarence, which is pretty close to Clark Kent). The newly empowered Mighty Truck rumbles about town doing good deeds, the first of which involves freeing Clarence’s friend, Bruno, from the mud – and Bruno, of course, does not recognize the “shiny-clean stranger.” Mighty Truck meanders all around Axleburg, using his newfound turbo power to rescue a cat and then pumping his huge tires up even more so he can climb a multi-level garage and jump to an under-construction building before a dislodged girder can fall (he then uses “his brightest headlights” to weld the girder in place). Kids will have a great time with Mighty Truck – and will especially enjoy the clever reason Barton gives for keeping his identity secret: Clarence knows that if he explains his transformation, he will have to stay clean all the time, and he “really wheely” does not want that, because “getting dirty meant having fun.” Further Mighty Truck adventures seem inevitable, and will be mighty welcome when they arrive.

(++++) EVERYDAY MAGIC, LIGHT AND DARK

Half Magic. By Edward Eager. Illustrations by N.M. Bodecker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

Everland. By Wendy Spinale. Scholastic. $17.99.

     A book that deserves to be called timeless even though it is not much more than half a century old, Edward Eager’s Half Magic is as winning today as it surely was when first published in 1954. It is a story of everyday life, of warmth and what are now called “family values,” and of the touches of real magic that cement a family even when some of its members can command the sorts of powers that we usually talk of when using the word “magic.” Eager’s suburban setting is a trifle quaint now, given the absence of computers and cell phones, but aside from that, Half Magic wears extremely well. The main reason is the charm of the underlying premise: taking a page from the marvelous books of E. Nesbit, whom he greatly admired, Eager (1911-1964) creates a story in which ordinary people living ordinary lives suddenly encounter something very much outside the ordinary. And they do not use it to gain great wealth or power but to try to fulfill everyday wishes, the sort that kids in 1954 – and kids today – have all the time. Or rather, in this case, the characters use the magic to try to fulfill half wishes: Eager came up with a wonderfully clever premise in which a magical object that looks a lot like an ordinary nickel is able to grant half of what its holders wish for. The four children – Jane, Mark, Katherine and Martha – have more depth and personality than kids in children’s books usually do nowadays, and while they certainly share some feelings (mostly involving the fact that their father has died and they are worried about their mother’s happiness), they are individuated enough to make very different sorts of wishes. Or, again, half wishes: the way the kids figure out the half-wish premise (especially their misadventure with their sort-of-talking cat) and then try to make wishes that will get them all they want by wishing for twice what they want is one of the many enjoyments of the book. The wishes themselves range from the exotic (a trip to Camelot and confrontation with Merlin, who proclaims the object’s magic older than his own and who proves quite quick on the uptake about using it to make successful half wishes) to the mundane (Jane’s wish to be in some other family, and her realization that that is not what she wants after all). The characters stay true to themselves throughout the book, and the eventual happy ending, in which they all realize that they already have what they wish for most – each other – is certainly sentimental but is not as oozingly treacly or forced-feeling as are many conclusions of books for young readers today. Half Magic has a pleasantly meandering, unforced narrative feel to it that is as engaging in the 21^st century as it was in the middle of the 20^th.

     There is a Katherine in Wendy Spinale’s Everland, too – spelled Katherina – but that is about all this book has in common with Eager’s. The real-world setting here is an alternative-world one: for readers who would prefer to strip away every last vestige of charm from a magical tale and see it as dark, dour, and thoroughly downbeat, Everland is as unpleasant a reimagining of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as anyone has come up with in recent years. A straightforwardly dystopic novel in which London has been destroyed by bombs and disease and only children have survived, Everland is all about 16-year-old Gwen Darling; her younger siblings, Joanna and Mikey; a German army contingent led by Captain Hanz Otto Oswald Kretschmer (hence the acronym “Hook,” of course); the evil Marauders and their good-guy enemies, the Lost Boys; an underground city where a boy named Peter lives and spends time outfoxing the baddies; and, yes, a “second star to the right,” which is about all that this utterly charmless and frequently ugly (++) book retains of Barrie’s sense of wonder and exploration. To be sure, Barrie’s work is itself considerably darker and more adult than the many later adaptations of it, from the famous musical starring Mary Martin to the 1953 Disney film and the live-action movie made 50 years later. But if there is pervasive regret in Barrie about the necessity of growing up, and wistfulness for both the real and imagined joys and adventures (and frights) of childhood, Peter Pan has so many compensatory charms that it has rightly been a classic since first staged in 1904. Pretty much anything potentially classic has been stripped from Everland, which mixes steampunk sensibilities (lots of zeppelins) with bits of scientific absurdity (a deadly virus and, for a possible cure, a mixture of stem cells with elements that make possible autotomy – tail regrowth – in some lizards). The dim name echoes of Peter Pan, not only “Hook” but also “Smeeth,” are the primary connections that Spinale establishes with Barrie’s story, but it is quite certain that Everland is not intended for readers who have any familiarity with (much less love for) Peter Pan in any of its guises. Barrie is merely a jumping-off point for Spinale; and that would be fine if Everland had any significant originality in plotting, pacing or characterization. But it has none of these – it is just another good-vs.-evil dystopia – and it emphatically eschews humor, which might have made the whole tale more palatable. Having Gwen and Hook narrate alternating chapters would have been a good plan if doing so had created some balance and even ambiguity, showing Gwen to have some level of darkness within and Hook to have some sort of justifiable (even if twisted) motivation. But Spinale is either uninterested in nuance or unsure how to proffer it (Everland is her first novel). By the end of the book, when the good guys win and the bad guys lose, when Gwen realizes she is growing up and there is a hint that even Peter, too, may be doing so at last, readers have been subjected to a whole series of cinematic action scenes and surface-level dialogue, all without any significant portion of plot creativity; and, in fact, it is almost as hard to care about the fate of the “good guys” here as it is figure out why the “bad guys” do what they do (well, they are bad; that pretty well takes care of things). It is fire (why is it so often fire?) that eventually cleanses things here, but anything else that swept away the tatters of this disappointing story would have been equally welcome.

(+++) ALLOWABLE HUMOR, REQUIRED SERIOUSNESS

The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin. By Elinor Teele. Walden Pond Press. $16.99.

Lily and Dunkin. By Donna Gephart. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     Quirky protagonists are generally welcome in books for preteens, and for some authors, the more quirky characters in a book, the better. This was one reason the Lemony Snicket books were quite popular for some time, and it is those books that come to mind when reading Elinor Teele’s The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin. The not-nice quirky adults determined to reel in and mistreat the nice quirky kids are everywhere in this novel, which is supposed to feel like a romp but seems a bit too forced for that. The action starts in grimy, depressing Pludgett, the town where 11-year-old John Coggin and his six-year-old sister, Page, live with Great-Aunt Beauregard after the death of their parents. The family business is coffin making: John builds caskets already, and the story gets moving when Great-Aunt Beauregard announces that John will become a partner in the business and Page will leave school to start working there as well. The two kids therefore decide to run away – John is actually good at coffin making, but he is really an inventor of wonderful machines (or so he thinks), and is stifled in the family firm. The two kids first meet Boz, a strange stranger associated with a wandering circus, who drives them away in a horse-drawn fire engine. John and Page rather like the circus, but John’s attempt to invent a steam-driven vehicle called the Autopsy comes to nothing; soon he and Page move on, this time encountering a woman named Maria, who owns a bakery. Things seem all right at first, but money is tight, and when John tries to help by creating a new oven for Maria, he succeeds only in blowing up the bakery. Again, John and Page move on, next encountering an archeologist and self-defense expert named Miss Doyle – from whom they are kidnapped by the nefarious Great-Aunt Beauregard. The question is whether John’s dubious inventing talents, and the help of the various helpful adults he and Page have met on their travels, will allow him to create something that will make it possible for him and Page to get away from Great-Aunt Beauregard and the other not-nice grown-ups. The whole story is filled with rather obscure vocabulary – another way in which it resembles the Series of Unfortunate Events books – and readers’ enjoyment will hinge in part on whether they do or do not like comments like that of Boz: “Merely a miscalculation on my weight-to-height ratio. I shall indulge in pâté de fois gras for a few days, and all will be right with the world.” There is also the question of how much readers enjoy boogers (which drop into people’s soup) and poop (which John uses to power his inventions). Teele seems to be trying too hard, if not to emulate Snicket, then to show protagonists who are plucky as well as quirky, resourceful as well as put-upon. The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin has an underlying repetitious quality: protagonists on their own, protagonists interacting with new people, all going well, all getting messed up, protagonists on their own again. Since neither John nor Page is much developed as a character, it is the action here rather than the personalities to which readers will be attracted – or not.

     In contrast, Donna Gephart’s Lily and Dunkin is strictly personality-driven, at least on the surface. But this is an IMPORTANT book, a book with THINGS TO SAY, a book to ENLIGHTEN readers, a book to be taken VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED, and thus the personalities are very carefully crafted to communicate the message, just as the “personality” of protagonist Christian was created by John Bunyan for the sole purpose of furthering the message of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Religious allegory is uncommon nowadays, doubly so in works for young people, but a secular version of it is very much present in books such as Lily and Dunkin. Once upon a time, many people urged sincerely and at length that individuals should be judged not on how they looked but on what they did – in other words, that willful blindness to a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation was the foundation of tolerance. Today the societal pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that it is considered offensive not to look first at a person’s skin, belief system or sexuality and then interact with the person on that basis. The current notion is that people can be treated fairly only when their observed externalities are seen and 100% accepted by everybody, specifically and particularly including those with different observed externalities. Color blindness is very much out; color awareness, followed by deference, is very much in. And so it is also with sexuality, which is the topic addressed in Lily and Dunkin. The book is about transgender eighth-grader Lily Jo McGrother, a girl born in a boy’s body (as Timothy). Lily cannot, of course, be a fully formed human being with worries, doubts and uncertainties – in the current societal climate, Lily must know without the slightest doubt that s/he is transgender, and must be uncertain only about how to present that certainty to the world at large. Or, for that matter, to individuals within that world, such as Norbert (Dunkin) Dorfman, who first sees Lily in a dress – clothing for which Lily makes excuses until she is ready to tell Dunkin the not-awful-at-all truth. For his part, just to create a balancing act between the title characters, Dunkin is bipolar – as if Gephart is saying, “See? Everyone has something to deal with and to figure out how and when to reveal, and to whom.” Lily and Dunkin is so determinedly well-meaning, so sure that it is on the side of right and goodness and virtue and the contemporary belief in seeing the outside of a person first and foremost and delving only later, if at all, into the person’s inner thoughts and feelings, that it becomes every bit as much a sermon as The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here there are two pilgrims, Lily and Dunkin, both progressing along the road from misunderstanding to that of tolerance and acceptance. Every right-thinking 21^st-century young reader, secular or religious, is expected to follow this story from start to finish in order to arrive at the promised land of perfect understanding and appreciation of differences – and anyone who points out the extremely formulaic story and the straw-man approach that Gephart uses again and again to make points is just being churlish. Lily and Dunkin is fine for preteens who are happy being told what to think and how to think. There is much less in it for those who want to think for themselves, who are trying to tackle and come to terms with gender identity, mental illness and other extremely important topics on their own and in a thoughtful way.

(+++) AMERICA, PSYCHED OUT

Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. By Jesse Jarnow. Da Capo. $27.99.

     Fans of the Grateful Dead will be delighted to learn that they are the most important cultural influence the United States has had in the last half century. At least that is the impression that Jesse Jarnow offers in Heads, an exhaustively researched and often entertaining look at America as Psychedelic Central that starts from the premise that the members of the Grateful Dead – and the band’s followers – were and still are at the epicenter of pretty much everything societally interesting. “The Dead’s music makes a particularly good soundtrack for long highway miles as groupminds get together and keep the cosmic fire aflicker and the joints lit, because there’s something coming. There’s always something coming.” That pretty much encapsulates Jarnow’s thesis as well as his style, the latter being so determinedly with-it that it sometimes hovers on the edge of self-parody: “The biggest city in psychedelic America is a portable bopping skyline on the horizon. The little municipality moves from town to town, bringing drugs and access points to numerous alternative social networks.”

     Jarnow takes the Dead very seriously, and he truly believes their impact is omnipresent, even attributing today’s use of emoji to Dead influence and what Jarnow deems to be the victory of the psychedelic revolution. That this is over the top goes without saying – well, not really, since Jarnow says it, but it is often as entertaining as it is overdone. Jarnow does a really fine job as a pop historian of figures both well-known (Ken Kesey) and known well only in limited areas (Owsley Stanley [“Bear”], 1935-2011, Bay Area audio engineer and central mover of the San Francisco hippie movement in the 1960s). Heads sprawls by design and sometimes, it seems, of its own volition, as Jarnow probes the interrelationship of psychedelic drugs and Grateful Dead music with American culture as a whole and the birth of the Internet in particular. The book’s very casual voice belies the clearly careful research that Jarnow has done, including a genuinely impressive number of interviews with key figures in the psychedelic movement in general and the Dead’s milieu specifically. Jarnow in fact comes across as so committed a Deadhead that anyone not within that particular purview is likely to be confused or put off from time to time – actually a lot of the time, since the book is crammed with insider language, references clear only to those already in the know, and a general sense of hipster cool that you either share before reading or will find it impossible to acquire within these 468 pages.

     The fact is that a lot of Heads reads like a stoner memoir, with Jarnow writing as if he has been up all night while sampling a variety of the substances he is writing about – and whether this is true or merely his authorial persona is beside the point. The style is the substance here, to a great degree, even if Jarnow seems never to have heard of Marshall McLuhan (he never mentions him, in any case). Thus, the frequently revelatory cultural analysis is available only to readers who are willing and able to accept Jarnow’s meandering, discursive, tangent-filled narrative at face value and, um, “go with the flow.” There is so much of the Dead here that Jarnow’s forays into discussing intriguing and less-known elements of psychedelia-spawned culture get short shrift. It would have been nice, for example, to know more about New York’s street-art-focused Parkies and the use of psychedelics by many of the founders of what is now the technology-permeated Silicon Valley. The fact that Jarnow brings up these elements of the psychedelic subculture (or culture) at all is a strength of the book; the fact that he passes over them rather lightly, while dwelling at such great length on all things Deadhead, is a weakness.

     It is absolutely necessary to accept and revel in Jarnow’s trivia-and-reference-packed style in order to get the most from Heads. “Spinning is their meditation. The lyrics of Robert Hunter, as passed through the soul of Garcia, are their texts. But even more fundamental is Garcia’s guitar playing, his note-clusters direct translations of the Logos, as valuable and real as what Terrence McKenna speaks of when describing his DMT experiences. It’s Jerry, the Spinners know.” To those for whom this sort of writing is immediately comprehensible and even profound, Heads will be revelatory and immensely involving. To those for whom it is abstruse, self-indulgent and preoccupied with minutiae, Heads will come across as much ado about – well, not “nothing,” because there is really a great deal of information here, a lot of it fascinating, but much ado about much less than Jarnow strives so mightily to deem deeply significant.

(++++) WHEN SOLOISTS SOAR

Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Volume IV—Violin Concerto; Piano Concerto. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Dénes Várjon, piano; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Heinz Holliger. Audite. $18.99.

Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Volume V—Konzertstück for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 92; Konzertstück for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 134; Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra; Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra. Alexander Lonquich, piano; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Paul van Zelm, Ludwig Rast, Rainer Jurkiewicz and Joachim Pölti, horns; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Heinz Holliger. Audite. $18.99.

Victor Herbert: Cello Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Irish Rhapsody. Mark Kosower, cello; Ulster Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $12.99.

First Day: Music of José Bragato, Bohuslav Martinů, Caleb Burhans, Alberto Ginastera, George Enescu, Dan Visconti, Marin Marais and Francis Poulenc. Laura Metcalf, cello; Matei Varga, piano. Sono Luminus. $15.99.

     Having long since proved himself a superior oboist, Heinz Holliger is now well on the way to proving himself a very fine conductor as well. The fourth and fifth volumes of his Audite series of Schumann’s complete symphonic works, featuring the excellent playing of WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, give Holliger a chance to move into some hyper-familiar territory and show what sorts of nuances and new approaches he can bring to it. It turns out that Holliger’s view of the music is refreshingly clear-headed and generally straightforward, breaking no major new interpretative ground but at the same time not striving unnecessarily for some sort of unwarranted attention based on pushing the music in directions in which it does not necessarily want to go. This is especially clear in the ever-popular Piano Concerto, for which soloist Dénes Várjon dishes up a suitable degree of lyricism and a good sense of the finale’s dance rhythms, but neither he nor Holliger seeks to expand the work beyond its comparatively modest dimensions or treat it as more than a piano fantasy (which is what Schumann originally planned the first movement to be) with some marvelously expanded lyricism. The performance, although light and fleet, is not small-scale: it is appropriately scaled for the music, and works well as a result. The less-often-heard Violin Concerto fares quite well here, too. Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a big reason for this: she takes the music at face value and allows its essentially symphonic structure to dominate, not seeking violin supremacy when Schumann did not really provide it (the first movement even lacks a cadenza). Holliger, likely benefiting from his own role as a soloist, provides just the right balance of backup here, with the orchestra dominating much of the time but with Kopatchinskaja coming to the fore when given the opportunity. The concerto itself is on the heavy side, especially in the first movement, and can easily become turgid; but both soloist and conductor manage to prevent that from happening through judicious instrumental balance and a particularly strong sense of dance in the finale, with its pronounced polonaise rhythm.

     Kopatchinskaja does a commendable job with the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra as well. Like the Violin Concerto, this is late Schumann, and like the longer work it can be problematic to interpret. The violin writing tends to be rather routine, its figurations prosaic, and the orchestral accompaniment is somewhat foursquare. Yet the urgency and lyricism of the Fantasy shine through here despite the work’s undoubted weaknesses, and as in the concerto, Holliger has a fine sense of when to bring the orchestra to the fore and when to hold it back. The two piano-and-orchestra works that Schumann designated Konzertstücke are more successful than the violin one of the same basic type, and will put listeners in mind of the first movement of the Piano Concerto in their free-ranging lyricism and the warm communicativeness of the thematic material. The pianist here, Alexander Lonquich, does a creditable enough job, although his playing does not have much personality: it is more than satisfactory technically but not especially idiomatic. Still, these two concert pieces come across quite effectively, thanks again in large part to Holliger’s sensitivity to instrumental balance and his understanding of the best way to give the soloist plenty of chances to be out in front of the orchestra and just as many to pull back and let the orchestral musicians come to the fore. Also on this CD is the always fascinating Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, one of Schumann’s experiments in instrumentation and one instance among many in which the composer attained somewhat less than total success but nevertheless produced a work filled with charm and unusual sonorities. Here the horn soloists need to perform as a quartet almost throughout, blending their different lines while accepting Schumann’s differing characterizations of horn sounds: here a signal, there a lyrical line, here a traditional hunting call, there a full symphonic calling-forth. The four horn players here are well-balanced and have nicely complementary tone: all are longtime members of the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, with Paul van Zelm being principal horn and Ludwig Rast second principal. And Holliger – again with considerable sensitivity to soloists’ roles – does a fine job of balancing the horn quartet against the orchestra as a whole.

     Balance with an orchestra is particularly difficult to attain when the solo instrument is a cello. One reason Dvořák’s Cello Concerto is so consistently impressive is that the composer fits the cello into the orchestral fabric so expertly, while at the same time finding ways for it to stand out without having the orchestra seem to recede totally into the background. But Dvořák’s work did not spring forth without precedent: it was in fact directly inspired by Victor Herbert’s Cello Concerto No. 2, whose success in cello-orchestra balance deeply impressed Dvořák and is adeptly demonstrated by JoAnn Falletta and the Ulster Orchestra on a new Naxos CD. Dvořák chose B minor for his work; Herbert had picked E minor. But the two concertos have little in common aside from their minor keys and their composers’ skill in balancing the orchestral and solo parts so the cello would not be subsumed within the larger string ensemble. Herbert’s work is tuneful and lyrical, much smaller in scale than Dvořák’s, and in fact more tightly knit than Herbert’s own prior cello concerto in D major. Grace and a kind of modest emotionalism are the hallmarks of both the Herbert concertos, which date to 1884 and 1894. Mark Kosower handles both with just the right balance of emotion and reserve: there is nothing in either that approaches Dvořák’s concerto’s last-movement in memoriam section, and both Kosower and Falletta clearly understand that Herbert, while a skilled orchestrator and pleasant tunesmith, was not particularly innovative either in instrumental sonority or in his approach to form. Neither of the Herbert concertos is really a virtuoso showpiece, and neither is given that treatment here: the performers offer well-paced, well-thought-out readings of works of modest scale and moderate inventiveness. And the CD contains a bonus that is more fun than either concerto, if no more profound: Herbert’s Irish Rhapsody of 1892, essentially a pastiche of once-popular (and in some cases still-popular) Irish tunes, done to a turn and orchestrated with greater inventiveness than is evident in the concertos. The Irish Rhapsody is salon music writ large, which does not in any way make it less enjoyable.

     The enjoyment of a new Sono Luminus CD featuring cellist Laura Metcalf and pianist Matei Varga is of a different sort. There is a tendency nowadays to produce recordings aimed at a performer’s fan base rather than at music lovers in general – an approach that is actually quite old but seems to be accentuated by the many releases touting “first this and first that.” In this case the recording is the first solo release by Metcalf, a very fine cellist with a penchant for contemporary music and unusual sounds, as shown in her work with the string quartet Sybarite5 and the cello-and-percussion group Break of Reality. The pieces on this (+++) CD are clearly of importance and meaningfulness to Metcalf, and likely to Varga as well, but they are such a varied mixture that they seem designed to be heard by the family and personal friends of the performers rather than a wider audience. The best-known piece here is Marin Marais’ Variations on “La Folia,” whose multiple moods Metcalf and Varga handle well. The most interesting works on the disc, though, are two rarities: a one-movement Sonata in F minor by George Enescu, written when the composer was 17 and already showing this child prodigy to be in full command of instrumental writing, and the folksong-based Variations on a Slovakian Theme by Bohuslav Martinů. The rest of the music is of varying quality and interest, including Francis Poulenc’s warm Les Chemins de l’amour, Alberto Ginastera’s rhapsodic Pampeana No. 2, José Bragato’s pleasant but rather inconsequential Graciela y Buenos Aires, and world première recordings of cello versions of works by Caleb Burhans (Phantasie, originally for trombone and piano) and Dan Visconti (Hard-Knock Stomp, originally for viola). Listeners interested in finding out what sort of music Metcalf and Varga like will enjoy this foray into their musical preferences; but beyond the personal connection, the recording has no underlying thematic connectivity and nothing special to offer except some very fine playing – which, to be sure, is a strong attraction, even if not all the music will be as widely appealing as is Metcalf’s skill.

(+++) RECONSIDERATIONS

Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5. Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Sony. $13.99.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 6; Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, No. 8 and Op. 72, No. 3. Houston Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Christopher Rouse: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4; Odna Zhizn; Prospero’s Rooms. New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert. Dacapo. $16.99.

Redes: The classic 1935 Mexican film with a new recording of the score by Silvestre Revueltas. Post-Classical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Naxos DVD. $19.99.

     Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s death on March 5, 2016 brought an end to any prospect of a new Beethoven cycle from him, featuring his own period-instrument orchestra, the Concentus Musicus Wien. Listeners are left only with one CD, Sony’s release of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, to speculate about what could have been. The word “quirky” has to appear somewhere in that speculation. The symphonies that Harnoncourt here reconsiders – he made a recording of the full cycle with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in 1991 – are exceptionally well played and very thoughtfully, if strangely, interpreted. No. 4 gets a wide-ranging, full-throated interpretation in which prominent brass (the brass are excellent throughout) give the symphony a grander and altogether larger footprint than it usually receives. Yet the performance downplays certain instruments, notably the bassoon, which gives this work an unusual flavor when a conductor chooses to draw attention to it – just as the oboe in the first movement of No. 5 and the piccolo in that symphony’s finale change the work’s character based on the degree to which a conductor focuses on them. Harnoncourt makes an effort to adhere to Beethoven’s original tempo indications, so this Fourth is fleet but by no means rushed-sounding. And Harnoncourt seeks to lend it extra gravity and heft by strongly accentuating tutti chords by pausing slightly before having the orchestra attack them vigorously – an approach that increases the music’s intensity at the expense of some of its forward flow. The same approach to chords is used in the Fifth, but much less successfully – by the very end of the symphony, Harnoncourt seems to be conducting the conclusion of Sibelius’ Fifth rather than Beethoven’s. And aside from the chordal emphasis, Harnoncourt has some other unusual ideas about the Fifth. The famous opening motto is less accentuated than usual, for one thing; and the second movement is treated as a kind of tone poem, with numerous tempo changes that are not in the score but seem intended to make the whole movement into a grand adventure along the lines of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth. The third movement, on the other hand, is superb, with lower strings and brass biting and intense – and the fourth movement proceeds splendidly, with Harnoncourt drawing attention to all the instruments Beethoven added specifically for this movement (trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon) in a way that enriches the whole performance, at least until the very end stops it in its tracks. This is a carefully thought-out but, on the whole, strangely unsatisfactory reading of these symphonies, as if Harnoncourt did not so much think them through as over-think them to a point at which their emotional connectivity was diminished.

     The emotional connection is on the slight side as well in the Houston Symphony’s performance of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 on PentaTone. The most Brahmsian of Dvořák’s symphonies, the Sixth needs grand scale, warmth and solid forward flow to come across effectively; given those, it is very effective indeed. Unfortunately, Andrés Orozco-Estrada decides that the best way to delve into the symphony is to tinker with its tempo indications, and this creates a series of speedups and slowdowns that collectively make the work seem choppy and unfocused – very different from Brahms’ Second, which is also in the key of D and which shares much of the expansiveness of Dvořák’s Sixth, including an especially long first movement. Orozco-Estrada repeatedly gives the impression of wanting to get on with it in that opening movement, then thinking better of rushing things and slowing them back down again. The result is a kind of stuttering that is out of keeping with the smooth and very beautiful flow that Dvořák produced in this symphony. The recording itself is excellent, but the unfocused interpretation makes it hard to garner full enjoyment of the fine sound and high-quality playing of the orchestra. And the disc is really unconscionably short: the only things on it are the symphony and two of the Slavonic Dances, resulting in a paltry 52 minutes of music on a premium-priced recording. Nothing here is actually bad, but nothing is thoughtful or emotionally connected enough to recommend wholeheartedly.

     It is a general reconsideration of Dvořák’s symphonic output that is leading more conductors to program symphonies other than his final three. But there are other forms of reconsideration in music today as well, such as Christopher Rouse’s reexamination of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 in his own Symphony No. 3 of 2011. This is a reconsideration of a reconsideration, since Prokofiev based his work on Beethoven’s final piano sonata, No. 32. Prokofiev’s symphony is not often heard – it is a product of the experimentalism of Paris in the 1920s, and its largely unremitting intensity can be off-putting – but Rouse’s Third, after its explosive brass opening mirroring Prokofiev’s, goes off in directions more reflective of Rouse’s own style. The overall impression of Rouse’s symphony is one of hyperactivity: the work generally moves quickly, and the first variation of the second movement, which is in effect a scherzo, is the most intense of all. The juxtaposition of intense dissonance with expressiveness in that second movement, which like Prokofiev’s is a set of variations, is so extreme as to be difficult to hear at times, but it is certainly effective – and the work, which gets its world première recording on a new Dacapo CD, is very well played by the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert. The three other works here are also world première recordings, all three of them having been commissioned by this orchestra while Rouse (born 1949) was its composer-in-residence. Symphony No. 4, less striking and easier to listen to than No. 3, includes some quotations from other composers’ works, for reasons that are not clear from the music itself; yet this symphony has none of the balanced uncertainty or stylistic peculiarity of others filled with or built around quotations, such as Shostakovich’s No. 15. Also on this CD are the tone poems Odna Zhizn (2008) and Prospero’s Rooms (2012). The former, whose title means “A Life” in Russian, has enough turbulence and turmoil to make it seem that the life in question was a difficult one – although the music’s quiet, peaceful conclusion suggests that it ended well. The latter tone poem is the shortest work on this disc and in many ways the most effective. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s thoroughly creepy The Masque of the Red Death, in which Prince Prospero locks himself and his hangers-on into a palace of differently colored and decorated rooms in the doomed hope of escaping a plague, Rouse’s work is highly evocative of its source and musically involving enough to be actually chilling. This recording offers a lot of Rouse’s music and will be of most interest to those already familiar with the composer; Prospero’s Rooms might well make those who do not know Rouse’s work seek out other pieces by him.

     If the Rouse CD is a specialty audio item, a new Naxos DVD of the film Redes is a specialty audio and video one. Redes is the story of a fishing village near Veracruz, Mexico. Originally planned as a documentary, it was turned into a fictional film about poor fishermen struggling against exploitation. Its title means “nets,” although the film was released in English as “The Wave.” The film is noteworthy for the cinematography by Paul Strand, less so for the direction by Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel. Whatever the merits of the film itself, its music, by Silvestre Revueltas, has long been recognized as significant. Revueltas, who had not written film music before, created a dramatic and atmospheric score whose effectiveness was clear from the outset: both Revueltas and conductor Erich Kleiber made orchestral suites from it, and both those suites are still performed (Kleiber’s more frequently). Interestingly, Revueltas’ complete score has never been recorded before, so the recording by the Post-Classical Ensemble under Angel Gil-Ordóñez – one of the most inventive, clever and high-quality groups of its type – is a world première. The music rarely overlaps film dialogue, instead enhancing the story line and helping propel the narrative in highly effective program-music fashion. As a result, this recording of Redes is enjoyable from a purely musical standpoint, whatever one’s opinion of the film itself may be. This is music that does more than set scenes: it actively participates in them. It is quite possible (and quite interesting) to close one’s eyes or simply turn off the video portion of this DVD and listen to the music on its own, finding out how well it tells the same story that the filmmakers are communicating visually. To fill out the DVD after the one-hour movie, there is an additional hour of bonus material in which Gil-Ordóñez, producer Joseph Horowitz and others discuss various aspects of Redes and Revueltas from musical and sociopolitical standpoints. Like the film music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Revueltas’ work for Redes is a high point of composition for a visual medium that, when it is supported by audio as well-constructed as the best film music can be, is capable of communicating with far greater impact than the pictures can on their own.

(++++) NIGHTY-NIGHT

Go to Sleep, Monster! By Kevin Cornell. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Very Little Sleeping Beauty. By Teresa Heapy. Illustrations by Sue Heap. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.

     With all the bedtime books out there, it seems reasonable to imagine that there would be a glut. After all, how many ways can authors and illustrators show reluctant sleepers a set of bedtime-related problems requiring clever solutions of some sort? But the books keep coming, and the offbeat answers to everyday nighttime concerns never seem to stop. Of course, some books are a bit beyond the everyday, such as Go to Sleep, Monster! Kevin Cornell starts with the ordinary-enough notion of beneath-bed baddies stopping kids from getting some rest, but he takes it up to new levels. Or, not to be directionally inaccurate, down to new levels. It seems that a boy name George, first seen clutching the covers to his face in a very well-drawn darkened room, cannot get to sleep one night because of the monster under his bed. So his sister, Anna, comes in to help. And sure enough, there is a monster under the bed, complete with wide smile and purple, egg-shaped head. Anna will brook no disobedience from such a creature: she orders it to stop scaring her brother, because it is time to go to sleep. But the monster cannot sleep – because there is a monster under the floor. Now it is time for a priceless, silent exchange of looks among the three characters, Anna, George and the monster. Well, something has to be done, so Anna climbs below the floor, followed by George and the purple monster, and finds a green, horned, one-eyed creature that she orders to go to sleep. But no, the monster cannot sleep, because there is a monster under the room. So down go Anna and George into a marvelously dark room-beneath-the-room in which the only light seeps in from the green monster’s level – but there is nothing there. Or – yes, there is, clinging to a chandelier out of fear of the monster under the table. Which is scared of the monster under the house, which fears the monster under the gravel, which is terrified of the monster under the dirt, which is petrified of the one “in the center-most center of the center of the earth!” How low can this go? Well, the troop of two kids and a whole passel of monsters makes it down to the dragonlike center-of-earth monster, only to find that it too is afraid – and of what, since “you’re the underest under something someone can be”? Aha! This monster is afraid of being alone! And so we have another marvelous silent page, illuminated this time by the light in the eyes of the whole cadre of characters; and the solution is obvious and delightful, as kids and monsters alike return to Anna’s and George’s house and happily fall asleep in a huge pile – which, however, does something mighty strange to the house itself…and that carries through all the way to the book’s back cover, which provides a suitably monstrous epilogue.

     Cornell invents his own bedtime fairy tale, but Teresa Heapy prefers to reinvent existing ones. Hence she and illustrator Sue Heap have produced Very Little Red Riding Hood, Very Little Cinderella, and now Very Little Sleeping Beauty. More accurately, this is about Very Little NON-Sleeping Beauty, who is so excited about her birthday party the next day – “with cake and Aunty Fairy” – that she cannot go to bed at all, much less as early as Daddy wants her to. So Very Little Sleeping Beauty launches into all the delaying tactics she can. First, Daddy must sing to her, and not a lullaby, and not just a single song. Daddy obliges, and then goes along with Very Little Sleeping Beauty’s follow-up insistence on “stories, and tickles, and dancing, and a jump on the bed!” And Daddy does it all with 100% good humor, too (showing parents just how much of a fairy tale this is). Indeed, Daddy’s upbeat attitude persists as Very Little Sleeping Beauty insists that he run upstairs and downstairs repeatedly to find her bear and blanket and get her a drink in her “special-est cup.” But – uh-oh – the cup is nowhere to be found, and Very Little Sleeping Beauty gets tired of waiting, so she wanders from room to room until she encounters Aunty Fairy in the “tallest tower room” and ends up having a problem with her birthday gift, a spinning wheel (that is, in this case, a wheel that spins). Troubles ensue, soon resolved by Daddy, who is still (extremely improbably) smiling; and finally, Very Little Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep “just as the sun was about to rise.” And she manages to sleep right through her birthday party! “No one could wake her, however hard they tried.” But of course there is a happy ending, as she wakes on her own – at what should be bedtime – and everyone has a “pyjama party” (British spelling: Heapy and Heap live in England). The layering of a straightforward story of a little girl who will not go to sleep on the classic tale of a princess whose sleep is magical and extended makes Very Little Sleeping Beauty, like the previous Heapy/Heap collaborations, an amusingly enjoyable story, although parents with less tolerance than the book’s Daddy (and less obliviousness than its Mommy) may want to think twice before using it as a bedtime book and possibly encouraging real-life all-nighters.

(++++) ANIMAL REALITY AND FANTASY

Cecil’s Pride: The True Story of a Lion King. By Craig, Juliana and Isabella Hatkoff. Photographs by Brent Stapelkamp. Scholastic. $17.99.

The Jungle Book. By Rudyard Kipling. Retold by Laura Driscoll. Illustrated by Migy Blanco. Harper. $17.99.

     Nature is not nice. No matter how humans glorify the natural world (as if humans were not themselves part of it), the fact is that animals are engaged 100% of the time in a fight to survive, reproduce and pass on their genes to a new generation (some would argue that so are humans, but that is another discussion). Cecil’s Pride could easily have been another “nature is grand” glorification of a regal-looking (to human eyes) lion whose killing by a hunter sparked anger and protests around the world – even though the hunt was legitimate, or the hunter had reason to believe it was. And to some extent, the writing by Craig Hatkoff and his daughters, Juliana and Isabella, is indeed a celebration of the lion that was given the human name Cecil by human observers. But the book is more than that, and better as a result. Photographer Brent Stapelkamp is a lion researcher who tracked and studied Cecil for nine years, and his excellent pictures show the inner workings of a lion pride in ways that make the book more lively and intriguing than it would be if it consisted only of celebratory, posed-looking photos. Thanks to Stapelkamp’s pictures and the Hatkoffs’ text, it is clear that Cecil’s life was not an easy or idyllic one: animals’ lives in the wild never are. The narrative explains how lion prides are formed and how they change, and it tells the story of how Cecil and his brother, named Leander by humans, fought for territory with a lion called Mpofu– resulting in Leander’s death – and what happened afterwards. This is actually the most remarkable part of the whole tale: Cecil fought with one of Mpofu’s sons, called Jericho by humans, but then the two actually paired up to rule territory together. This is almost unheard-of among lions, and even though Cecil’s Pride does not go into great detail about what happened, the Hatkoffs do convey a sense of surprise, even wonder, at the development. The book traces events affecting the Cecil/Jericho pride up to and including Cecil’s death and even thereafter – when, surprise upon surprise, Jericho accepted and in effect adopted Cecil’s cubs as his own, an extremely rare occurrence in a natural world in which (as the Hatkoffs explain at the end of the book), “the new leader of a pride wants to continue his bloodline” and therefore often kills the cubs of the previous leader, contributing to the 70% mortality rate for cubs before they mature. This underlying reality is what nature is all about, and an aspect that the usual “pretty” books about the natural world go out of their way to avoid discussing with young readers. Cecil’s Pride is all the stronger because it does not shrink from explaining the unpleasant realities of life in the wild – even as it simultaneously celebrates Cecil’s life and bemoans his death. And yes, the photos throughout really do show lions looking amazingly majestic and their cubs looking wonderfully cute – to human eyes, to be sure, but humans are part of nature, and hopefully young readers will pick up some of that reality by reading and seeing this book.

     Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was well aware from his own life experiences of nature’s realities, and if he is today read much less often than he used to be, that is because he was decidedly enamored of the British colonial experience on which the world and Great Britain itself have emphatically turned their backs since Kipling won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. Modified, rewritten versions of some of Kipling’s works do, however, continue to be popular, stripped of their colonialist orientation and stylistic quirks (“o Best Beloved” in the Just So Stories, and all the rest). Kipling’s coupling of imaginative storytelling with a fine sense of natural reality shines through even in highly simplified versions of his writings, such as Laura Driscoll’s version of The Jungle Book. Although intended for ages 4-8, this book, with its warm and pleasantly rounded illustrations by Migy Blanco, could appeal to even-younger children – there is not even much menace in the appearance of Shere Khan here, and his reasons for demanding that Mowgli be turned over to him (along with his plans if that happens) are never brought to the fore. The smiling, thoroughly anthropomorphic renderings of Baloo and Bagheera, and the very, very young-looking Mowgli himself, make this into a pleasant, almost back-yard-style adventure rather than a serious foray into the dangers and delights of the wild. Mowgli smiles almost constantly, even when keeping bees away while taking honey from them and splashing before entering a stream to keep water snakes back. The whole tone of this retelling is gentle and rather sweet, appropriate for very young children and fitting well within the realm of children’s books for a 21^st-century audience – and unlikely to result in those children wanting to track down the much darker original Jungle Book or read more of Kipling’s stories, which is something of a shame. This simplification may, however, result in kids wanting to see the 1967 Disney animated version of The Jungle Book, which had its own quirks and oddities and which Walt Disney himself insisted be made by animators who had not read Kipling’s original; or it may attract today’s kids to the Disney studio’s new live-action remake. In any of these guises – especially Kipling’s original, but even in the cuddliness of Driscoll and Blanco – The Jungle Book still has the power to captivate through its blending of fantasy with a sure understanding of the attractions and frights of the natural world.

(++++) APOCALYPSE WHEN?

The Everything Box. By Richard Kadrey. Harper Voyager. $24.99.

     Richard Kadrey writes fast-paced, profane, darkly funny supernatural adventure/thriller/comedies in which, paradoxically, the paragraphs that bring the action to a screeching halt are some of the best. Kadrey has a unique and absolutely wonderful way with descriptive words, drawing on a mixture of keen real-world observation and familiarity with the wholly artificial world of Hollywood films to create passages like this one about Laurel Canyon, above Los Angeles, from The Everything Box: “Luckily, there were roads that twisted up and down the tortured ridges, or the only things that would have been there were hippies, backpackers, prairie dogs, and the occasional mountain lion dining on the aforementioned hippies, backpackers, and prairie dogs. Unfortunately, because of those roads and the billion-dollar real estate, the most common life-forms were douche bags, plastic surgeons, fading film producers, and labradoodles."

     Kadrey is best known for his Sandman Slim novels, to which The Everything Box bears an entirely non-coincidental resemblance in its picaresque protagonist, his super-competent helper/girlfriend, the wild improbabilities of the plotting, and the inclusion of supernatural entities who are about as strife-ridden and narrow-minded as mere mortals and are equally prone to losing things, notably including the box of the title. That disappears while Kadrey is busy channeling Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel, with the box being misplaced by, yes, a stupid angel, who is licking his (its?) chops (do angels even have chops?) at the prospect of annihilating humanity once and for all after the Flood, but who discovers that the instrument of said annihilation is not where he thought he put it. Oops.

     Thus begins a story that can be called “madcap” only because there is no stronger descriptor (“insanecap,” maybe?). Stretching from 4,000 years in the past to the present-day purview of the Department of Peculiar Science (as if you didn’t believe the government had one of them), the story focuses on magic-object-thief Coop and a motley and often marvelous supporting cast of guys, gals, goons, gonifs and the occasional zombie. There is, for example, a supernatural character who likes things to be orderly in exactly the same way that Al Capp’s cadaverous mountaineer Smilin’ Zack liked things to be quiet, as in “not moving or even breathing.” Kadrey’s character talks pleasantly to various people he encounters on his travels, immediately before eviscerating them, drowning them in newly straightened rivers, observing them scream in pain in traffic pileups caused by winding roads suddenly becoming straight ones, and so on. Yes, an all-around nice guy, and by no means the “nicest.” Yet the character creation is not Kadrey’s best point – it is the way the characters interact that makes The Everything Box such a pleasure (albeit a rather guilty one). Take those film references. In a mere two pages (208 and 209, to be specific), Coop asks a particularly unpleasant DPS agent, “What’s your plan, Keyser Söze?” And the agent comments, “So you say, Gandalf.” And Coop’s eventual squeeze tells the agent, “We’re trying to steal the Constitution. …Haven’t you seen the movie? There’s a treasure map on the back.”

     Yet if it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with Hollywood excess when reading The Everything Box, it is scarcely necessary. What is necessary is appreciation of dialogue of the sort that Kadrey creates for Coop after a passing angel has exploded a nasty piece of work who was about to do Coop in: “You know, in the last few days, I’ve taken orders from a dead man, hung out with poltergeists, vampires, werewolves, people with tentacles, people with gills, and seen the inside of a turd submarine. After all that, I shouldn’t be surprised when someone tells me they’re an angel, but you know what? I am.” Also necessary is appreciation of what follows in the angel’s thoughts: “He’d forgotten about how hard it was for modern mortals to accept the concept of celestial creatures walking among them. The extent of their imaginations seemed limited to the certainty that cats were the best animals, extraterrestrials actually existed, Jim Morrison and Amelia Earhart were still alive and an item in Paris, and reptile people from the center of the Earth controlled all world governments. Only one of those things was true, but try explaining that to mortals.”

     And now that that is cleared up – surely you didn’t expect Kadrey to say which of the items is true – readers can proceed to the italicized summation of “the plot so far” helpfully provided by Coop just before he attempts to break into a safe that is really a transdimensional portal disguised as a microwave oven: “Mr. Lemmy wants the box. The angel wants the box. The glee club and their wacko cult friends want the box. But no one knows where the box is. Except now, Bayliss says she does. If she’s right and the box is there, it might be my only chance to get it and save Morty. But if I gave it to Mr. Lemmy I’d be screwing over Bayliss, and Giselle would never forgive me for that.” Even without knowing all the characters to which the names refer, it is pretty clear that what we have here is complexity befitting – well, befitting a Richard Kadrey novel, with which it is difficult to make comparisons.

     The Everything Box bids fair to become the start of an appealing new series for Kadrey, one with distinct overlap with elements of his Sandman Slim sequence but with enough individualized skewed peculiarity to stand on its own – or lurch and shamble about, anyway. Kadrey’s writing is a wholly engaging blend of the noir and the nasty, his characters are a mixture of the manic, the monstrous and the merely macabre, and his plots are horrifyingly hilarious (or hilariously horrifying; take your pick). The Everything Box may not be everything everybody wants it to be, but The Everything Box has everything an existing Kadrey fan – or someone who will soon become one – could wish for, all neatly wrapped and decorated with a beautiful Big Bang bow.

(+++) RECIPES FOR SUCCESS?

The Power of Being Yourself: A Game Plan for Success by Putting Passion into Your Life and Work. By Joe Plumeri. Da Capo. $14.99.

Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion. By Andy Glockner. Da Capo. $25.99.

     The notion of “authenticity” for success in the workplace is scarcely a new one, but motivational speaker Joe Plumeri – who would prefer to be called “inspirational” – tries mightily to reinvent it in The Power of Being Yourself. Plumeri, former head of global insurer Willis Group and before that a senior banking executive, suggests using the book in a collaborative way, sharing it with friends and discussing its points among yourselves so everyone will presumably benefit from Plumeri’s insights. The problem is that the insights go nowhere beyond that of Shakespeare: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” And Shakespeare delivered those lines in Hamlet with a sly twist, having them spoken by Polonius, whose wisdom was interspersed with matter-of-fact observations and a tittle of nonsense. Plumeri’s urging of readers to find their inner core and stick to it is given with no sense of irony whatsoever – instead, it is overlaid with guilt. And that is ultimately what sets The Power of Being Yourself apart from many other, otherwise very similar books. Plumeri offers heartfelt stories and a series of anecdotes about personal experiences, the deepest and most distressing of them being the death in 2008 of his oldest son, Christian, who battled anorexia and drug addiction from age 13 and died at 39 from, Plumeri says, an enlarged heart. Plumeri’s own heart seems to be a large one, in the emotional rather than the medical sense, and he makes it clear again and again that he holds himself greatly responsible for his son’s many failures and early death – even though Plumeri rescued Chris again and again from a long series of awful life choices, even to the point of raising Chris’ child when Chris could no longer do so. “My son was a drug addict since he was thirteen years old. I thought I did everything I could to help him, but obviously I didn’t do enough. I did the things that were structurally correct, but I didn’t spend the time or put in the emotion that I should have, and this is where I hope every reader of this book is paying attention. …So I’m a living, breathing cautionary tale.” Plumeri parlays this deeply distressing part of his life, with which readers surely will empathize, into advice and exhortations that are far less involving than the troubles underlying them. There are eight chapters encapsulating Plumeri’s advice to find work-life balance, and only one is headlined “Let Sadness Teach You,” but that is the main valuable message the book ultimately provides. The rest of it is not so much about personal authenticity in one’s career as it is about focusing on things beyond work, realizing that work is not all there is to life and it is crucial to be involved deeply in other things, family being paramount. This is scarcely revelatory. Plumeri comes across as likable and, through much of the book, as pleasantly upbeat despite the darkness in his family history. But readers seeking anything new in their quest for accomplishment in the business world will not find it here.

     They may, though, find some of it in Andy Glockner’s Chasing Perfection – that is, if they can take the information in this basketball-saturated book and use it for purposes beyond professional sports. Glockner here writes about people whose approach to success is the opposite of the one professed by Plumeri. There is nothing authentic whatsoever in these players, coaches, managers, team owners or the people advising all of them – there is only a set of objective data, collected and manipulated and squashed and squeezed and extracted and applied in every possible way to the enormously lucrative business of what some people laughably think of as a “game.” Really, this is not a book about basketball, except incidentally – but unfortunately, Glockner is a sports writer, and he clearly cares a great deal about basketball, thus guaranteeing that any reader who does not share the author’s predilections will find the book extraordinary difficult to become involved in or even, at times, to follow. Really, there is nothing particularly interesting in the umpteenth story about hugely overpaid professional performers engaging in competitive feats against other hugely overpaid professional performers. But there is a great deal that is fascinating about Big Data and the way Big Sports is now using Big Information to make Big Money. Old-fashioned basketball terms such as points, assists, rebounds and free-throw percentage are not the point here: the new vocabulary, Glockner says, includes gravity scores, offensive efficiency, real plus-minus, paint touches and more. These are the words used in analyses by companies such as Kinduct, P3 (Peak Performance Project), Second Spectrum, SportVU (which specializes in motion-capture cameras), Synergy Sports Technology and the like. Teams that have devoted themselves intensely to computer-based analytics have, Glockner says, been among the most successful in recent years; Glockner’s specific discussions of the San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets will interest basketball fans. Those interested in how Big Data is affecting more of our lives every day may be more intrigued by the reasoning behind the Rockets’ decision to sign James Harden, who had played rather fecklessly for the Oklahoma City Thunder but whose numbers added up in a way that led the Rockets to believe that, within their organization and within their playing style, he could become a superstar – which he did. Then there is the story of the Atlanta Hawks’ Kyle Korver, labeled by Glockner as the National Basketball Association’s “most perfected player,” who spends summers working out at P3 so the analysts there can fine-tune him. And yes, that sounds robotic, and that is exactly the point. The Big Data approach – which permeates pro basketball and other sports and is now being used at the college level as well – sees people as collections of data, manipulable in much the same way that Andy Serkis could be computer-manipulated to become Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. There is no emotion, no “heart” in Big Data – and there are some serious privacy concerns as the information is used to track players’ health and help owners and managers produce teams that are as strong as possible. Chasing Perfection raises some of these issues, and would be a far better book, and one of far greater reach, if it explored them outside its very limited context. But it is that context, professional basketball, that Glockner really cares about, so he has written a book for super-fans who take pro sports seriously and consider them meaningful – ignoring the genuinely serious and meaningful societal context in which these “games” are increasingly making use of minutiae of information, on whose basis there is a lot more riding than the question of who beats whom for some sports championship or other.