Not just for the holidays, but for all who treasure American popular music: a perfect gift.
Informative and thoughtful account of a song that became a wartime anthem, pioneered the evolution of holiday music, and “paved the way for the new music” sold on records rather than as sheet music.
The story of the song is central here, but along with those pertinent details, freelance journalist Rosen describes the changes in music since the 1940s and examines the role of Jews in the promotion of Christmas culture, a role that was “more profound than entrepreneurial savvy.” He suggests that Ira Berlin, a refugee from pogroms who with sheer chutzpah wrote “a Christmas anthem that buried all traces of the holiday’s Christian origins beneath three feet of driven snow” illustrates greater subtleties at work. Born in 1888 in Siberia, Berlin came to the US with his family at age five and grew up in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He dropped out of school and by 19 was working in the lower levels of Tin Pan Alley. His first song was published in 1907, but his career was launched in 1911 with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which sold two million copies. Rosen records all the great Berlin hits and shows preceding “White Christmas” and its venue, the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby. Its sales have topped 125 million copies, but Berlin originally intended it only as a revue song—a wry novelty tune set in Los Angeles, sung by sophisticated expat New Yorkers pining for a snowbound Christmas. Rosen describes how Crosby treated the song as a Christmas carol but also gave it an “erotic charge,” adding to its popularity. The radios and jukeboxes carrying Crosby’s recording to American troops made it a bestseller. Berlin, Rosen notes, always understood how powerful its yuletide associations were.
Not just for the holidays, but for all who treasure American popular music: a perfect gift.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1875-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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