London Times jazz writer Shipton tenders a new look at the life of legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. There have been, as Shipton himself points out in his preface, several other biographies of the musician (born John Birks Gillespie), as well as an autobiography that Shipton says, “has often been hailed as a landmark in oral history.” So why yet another examination of the life and music of the Cheraw, South Carolina, native? After posing that same question, Shipton, who also presents jazz programs for the BBC and has written biographies of Fats Waller and Bud Powell, responds, “The answer is to some extent all these books took their cues from him as to the shape and pattern of his life—I began to realize that, without in any way detracting from Dizzy’s immense achievement, there was more to be discovered about the influences on him.” Shipton does indeed concentrate extensively on Gillespie’s early influences, sometimes at the expense of Gillespie’s personal life. For example, even though he promises to explore Gillespie’s long-standing extramarital affair with songwriter Connie Bryson, which resulted in an illegitimate daughter, Jeanie Bryson, Shipton doesn’t get into that until nearly 300 pages into the book. Given that Jeanie was Gillespie’s only offspring, despite a successful marriage of over 50 years to his wife-manager, Lorraine, more attention should be focused on their father-daughter relationship (Gillespie did provide financial support, although he never admitted publicly that she was his daughter). That Shipton would gloss over the rich terrain of Gillespie’s personal life to concentrate on his music is almost commendable in this era of sensationalized biographies. However, he should not have promised to explore these issues if he was not prepared to follow up on them. Torn between the morally upright educated music book and the more sensationalistic material of his subject’s life, Shipton ends up with an unbalanced portrait that fails to satisfy.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-509132-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
