Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

Scholars, teachers, and students of fairy tales have been waiting for this terrific booka veritable Baedeker to fairyland.  A widely recognized expert on fairy tales, Warner (Birkbeck College, Univ. of London, UK) now presents a compact history delivered in fluid, bewitching prose.  Readers will grasp fairy tales in all their sensuous depth and profound pleasure, due to both the form and the content of Warner's narrative.  She opens with a prologue defining six characteristics of fairy tales.  The nine chapters that follow introduce key themes (such as metamorphosis, doubles, cannibalism, magic, the woods, talking animals, powerful/evil women) and provide a history of the main tellers of tales (Perrault, the Italians Straparola and Basile, the Grimms, Lang, et al.).  Warner also touches on fairy tale films, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, intertextuality, illustrators, and real-life precursors to characters such as Bluebeard.  Each overarching comment on the tropes of fairy tales is followed by multiple examples, demonstrating Warner's encyclopedic knowledge of the genre.  Woven into her prose are quotations from Walter Benjamin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, C. S. Lewis, and many others.  All of this in 180 pages!  The 16 illustrations, which are reproduced in (often muddy) black and white, are the only disappointment with the volume.Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Bivins (religious studies, North Carolina State Univ., and a respected jazz guitarist) provides a well-researched book about jazz and the American religious experience.  Many American singers and musicians are influenced by their religion when crafting their music, and the author explores that relationship in detail.  In the book's eight chapters he explains how jazz artists use themes of religion such as mediation, mysticism, cosmologies, and metaphysics to craft music that is spiritually stimulating and simultaneously appealing to secular listeners.  The book includes extensive notes; the discography is a Whos Who of jazzOrnette Coleman, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, et al.and lists some of jazz's most influential recordings.  Spirits Rejoice! is not a historical narrative of jazz but instead reads like what jazz music is structured but also loose, impromptu, and improvised.  This passionate, intellectually stimulating analysis of jazz and the influence of religion on musicians sets a precedent for work to follow.  The book should resonate with jazz lovers and scholars alike.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.