As diverse and diverting as a night at the Follies.
A rich and entertaining biography of Broadway’s first auteur.
Ever the witty and erudite raconteur, Mordden (All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919–1959, 2007, etc.) transports readers to the time when Times Square was just an intersection of streets. Shortly after Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. arrived in the 1890s, the new subway system made 42nd Street and Broadway a hub, bringing riders to what was becoming Theaterland. Ziegfeld hit the right place at the right time, but as Mordden wisely points out, the man knew exactly what to do as the stars were aligning. Ziegfeld had already honed his taste and producing skills in Chicago; he knew what he liked and what the public wanted. Besides making deals and (sometimes) writing checks, he put his stamp on what he staged. Ziegfeld spotlighted charismatic stars, signing Anna Held, Marilyn Miller, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, etc., and put them to work in lavishly designed revues, eventually known as the Ziegfeld Follies. For material and style, Ziegfeld drew on classic and popular entertainment forms—Goethe and sex, Mordden says—creating a Broadway template that prevails today, as anyone who sees the current New York revivals of the brassy Gypsy and the lyrical South Pacific will observe. Near the end of the ’20s, Ziegfeld set collaborators to work on an emerging form, the musical that wed songs to a strong, central narrative. The result was Show Boat, a cornerstone in American musical theater. Mordden gives ample attention to Ziegfeld’s personal life—in particular, his marriage to actress Billie Burke and his liaisons with the “American girls” he glorified on stage—but the main focus is the theater. The author’s descriptions are enlivening, his profiles sharp, his tone casual and elegant. He may never have met a diversion he didn’t like (the original route of the IRT; notes on kooch dancing) or a zinger he couldn’t resist (a description of Anna Held’s pelt-laden photo-op attire looked “like the interior of an Indian hunting lodge”).
As diverse and diverting as a night at the Follies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37543-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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