Though Piaf ruined her health and died young, this lucid, unsentimental appraisal suggests that she had the life she wanted,...
Another sharp, culturally resonant biography from Burke (Lee Miller, 2005, etc.)—this one an empathetic depiction of the French chanteuse as famed for her love affairs as for songs like “La vie en rose.”
Edith Piaf’s life (1915–63) was as turbulent as the gritty existences she chronicled in such early songs as “L’Accordéoniste.” She was raised for a time in a brothel managed by her paternal grandmother, and she began singing as a girl on the road with her father, an itinerant acrobat. Burke evocatively re-creates the raffish milieu of Piaf’s youth, particularly the Paris quarter of Pigalle, where she sang on the streets and in seedy music halls. Her lovers were often crooks, and her lifestyle was dissolute. Yet Piaf’s steely ambition led her to a series of mentors who improved her diction, gave her books to read and helped hone her craft so that her wholehearted emotional delivery gained the sophistication required to move into better clubs and recording studios. Though she took the traditional la chanson réaliste to a new level of complexity in such mature works as “La Foule,” the public displayed special fondness for songs that reflected her personal experiences. As is almost inevitable in the biography of a performer, the book’s second half is mostly a catalogue of concerts and recordings, along with the health crises and romances that earned Piaf an American reputation as the French Judy Garland. Burke demonstrates that she was a lot tougher than Garland, but was also careless of being surrounded by spongers who happily spent her hard-earned money and helped themselves to her belongings.
Though Piaf ruined her health and died young, this lucid, unsentimental appraisal suggests that she had the life she wanted, filled with “hectic drama” fueled by the singer’s “boundless joie de vivre.”Pub Date: March 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26801-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
