The Book Blog - Learning Resources at St. Johns River State College

Jimi Hendrix-Room Full of Mirrors

11/13/2024

Andrew Macfarlane---SJR State College

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Hello everyone, I hope you are all heading into the holiday season well!

This week I would like to discuss a book I have not finished yet, but it is good enough to recommend. One of my many personal interests is reading about music. One of the areas I like to study most is Seattle's music. Known most recently in our minds for the 1990s scene of grunge/rock and roll music, Seattle is also the birthplace of other musical legends like Quincy Jones, and the person I would like to speak about today, Jimi Hendrix.

The book I am reading, Room Full of Mirrors, is a biography about the life of Jimi Hendrix. When I begin a rock biography, I like to imagine how the musician or artist began. I ask myself questions like “Did this person sit in their room and play all day?” Or maybe “Did they have a teacher or a parent that showed them initially how to play and they ran with it?” In the case of Jimi Hendrix, it was mostly his pure desire to express himself through a guitar that made him want to be great.

Jimi grew up poor in Seattle. It is mentioned he first began playing a broom and mimicking the broom like a guitar to songs on the radio. Like it seems in many cases of great artists, his parents divorced when he was a younger boy. Jimi eventually obtained a beat-up acoustic guitar with one string, which he played while walking around the neighborhood. When he got to high school, Jimi finally obtained an electric guitar. Jimi was left-handed, but his father, a demanding alcoholic insisted he play right-handed. To get around this, Jimi would flip the guitar over and become proficient in playing it upside down to fool his father. When Al Hendrix, his father would walk out of the room, Jimi would flip it again back to his correct, left-hand playing side.

This is just one brief insight into the life of Jimi. I don’t want to ruin what happens next so I will say check it out for yourself! You will learn of tales from his Army experience, playing circuits around the southern United States and sharpening skills!

I do fear though, getting to the end of Jimi’s brief story. I say this only because I feel that I know what may happen next even if I haven’t gotten there yet. Many artists get to a level of fame where the talent they possess becomes big business. It makes a lot of money for many people. I think that artists who are young and have this vision get taken advantage of. Everyone wants a piece and there is money and careers on the line. Almost like a rocket that just cannot stop. Something like this I fear happened to Jimi, sadly, as well.

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My reading selections for National Native American Heritage Month

11/04/2024

Kayla Cook

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As November is National Native American Heritage Month, and as I haven’t had much time lately to read as much as I normally would (this semester has been a busy one!), I thought this time I would tell you all about two books I intend to read this month rather than books I have read.

Bridging the gap between spooky season and the rest of autumn, I’ve decided to read Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s edited volume Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. This book, first published in September 2023, is a collection of twenty-six short horror stories by Native American and Canadian First Nations authors. Its title refers to an Indigenous belief spanning the continent and transcending cultures that if one whistles after dark, they could risk inviting something sinister into their lives, one example being the Navajo skinwalker, a witch or spirit that can disguise itself as an animal for nefarious purposes. This book was a national bestseller and was nominated for multiple literary awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Anthology, the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology, and the Locus Award.

The other book I’m hoping to read this month is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. I just saw the film based on this book a few weeks ago (I’m a little behind the times, I know), and I thought it was a cinematic masterpiece. Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie Kyle in the film, is a fantastic actress, and it was wonderful to see her bring Kyle’s story into the spotlight. While the subtitle seems to imply that a primary focus of the book is the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Investigation, the film places the focus on Kyle and allows her, through Gladstone, to tell her story as the daughter and sister of a family destroyed by the greed and violence of the white men who sought to take everything from them, and as a survivor of this same greed and violence herself, as her husband and his family tried and ultimately failed to kill her the same way they killed her family. I’m very interested to see what details from the book might not have made it into the (three-and-a-half-hour!!!) movie, and to learn more about this moment in American history.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Call Number: E99.O8 G675 2016

ISBN: 9780385534246

Publication Date: 2017-04-18

Presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. In this last remnant of the Wild West--where oilmen like J.P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes like Al Spencer, the "Phantom Terror," roamed--many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

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