About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Bob Stanley
Positive Times Literary Supplement (UK) Stanley makes a strong case for the Bee Gees’ impact on twentieth-century music, but his portrayal also reveals them as harbingers of the global pop of the twenty-first. He repeatedly emphasises that the Bee Gees’ lyrics sound like translationese. In this they anticipate the present era.
Uwe Schütte
Mixed The Times Literary Supplement (UK) Schütte’s attention to the visual elements of Kraftwerk is one of the book’s strengths. He shows many of the band’s artistic influences, from El Lissitzky to Andy Warhol. And the visual angle fits the arc of Kraftwerk’s long history ... The book does justice to the importance of the visual artist Emil Schult, the group’s long-time collaborator and unofficial fifth member, who designed many of Kraftwerk’s album covers ... Schütte, who grew up in Germany, gives a granular sense of the specifically German aspects of Kraftwerk’s context ... Schütte also parses German terms closely, explaining at length why all English translations of industrielle Volksmusik, the term Kraftwerk coined to describe their music, are unsatisfactory ... This sort of cultural translation is generally helpful, although at times the book reads like a careless, over-literal translation from German ... There is a valid point to be made about reflexive stereotypes in early UK and US media coverage of Kraftwerk, but here, Schütte does not make it well. Elsewhere, the book is marred by dismissiveness and curmudgeonly gripes.
Gregor Von Rezzori, Trans. by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel and Marshall Yarbrough
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The sense of stylistic continuity between the two halves of the book is impressive given that three translators had a hand in producing it. Marshall Yarbrough has updated Joachim Neugroschel’s original translation of Abel, bringing it closer to the German original while coaxing previously brittle passages into a more supple prose; it fits seamlessly with David Dollenmayer’s translation of Cain ... dense, ornate prose ... The passages describing life before the war are melancholy and obsessive: Rezzori’s descriptions overflow as if he is desperate not to consign any detail to oblivion ... Though Rezzori’s work has often been described as nostalgic, this is something different from nostalgia – not a wistfulness for the past but a sense of it as a relentless weight to carry in the present.
Tim Mohr
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The improbable story of how East German punk grew from its tentative and belated beginnings to become one of the key forces in the opposition movement that toppled the DDR regime is the subject of Burning Down the Haus. ... The remarkable history of their struggles offers a rich and often surprising angle on youth culture and opposition movements in the DDR ... The book offers a captivating punk’s-eye view of everyday life as the DDR unravelled in its final years ... Both a moving story of indefatigable defiance in the face of oppression and a complex portrait of everyday life in the DDR in the 1980s, Burning Down the Haus honours the punk spirit with its history from below.