An old-fashioned Broadway biography of Richard Rodgers's first lyricist. Nolan (The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1978) presents a ``this-is-your-life'' account of Lorenz Hart's rise and fall. Born in 1895 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City's Harlem, Hart was raised in a boisterous household by a loving mother and a ne'er-do-well father who specialized in elaborate business scams. After directing amateur theatricals at summer camp, Hart began working on student revues at Columbia, where he met a young piano player named Richard Rodgers. Through classmate Herb Fields, then an aspiring writer, they were introduced to Fields's father, Lew, a theatrical impresario, who gave them their first break. After several abortive stabs at writing for Broadway, the partners were so unsure of their eventual success that Rodgers was tempted by an offer to sell babies' underwear just before their first big hit, a score for the Theater Guild's Garrick Gaieties of 1935. Rodgers and Hart went on to create many well-known musicals, including Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, The Boys from Syracuse, and the great Pal Joey. Along the way, Hart pushed for lyrics—witty, cosmopolitan, full of current slang and topical allusions—whose quality was a notch above the ``moon-June-spoon'' fare of previous popular songs; he also insisted that songs be an integral part of the play, not just interpolations to suit a particular singing star. The writer was dogged by low self-esteem and a homosexual bent that Nolan seems most uncomfortable discussing; Hart eventually became so addicted to late-night carousing that he aggravated his more prudish partner. Rodgers finally paired up with Oscar Hammerstein shortly before Hart's death in 1943 to compose the immortal Oklahoma!, which launched the modern musical era. A sympathetic account for fans of the musical theater of the '30s and '40s. (15 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-506837-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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
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