For both casual fans and serious aficionados.
Innovator, iconoclast, hipster icon—even today, over a decade since his death, Miles Davis remains one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures in the history of 20th-century music.
Born in 1926, the son of a prosperous dentist, Miles Dewey Davis III was raised in East St. Louis, where he was already playing the trumpet in local dance bands by the time he was a teenager. In addition to being something of a child prodigy, he was a serious student of music and was admitted to Juilliard, although he soon dropped out, finding bebop, a style then beginning to emerge from New York's jazz clubs, more suited to his restless intelligence. After apprenticing with such innovators as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he struck out on his own, becoming one of the primary exponents of what became known as “cool” jazz, and his albums, including Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and Bitches Brew, remain among the most popular and influential ever recorded. Davis was a notoriously difficult personality whose relationships with women, other musicians, audiences, and critics were complex and often contentious. Even his death was controversial: officially attributed to a stroke, it was rumored to have been brought on by AIDS, the legacy of a lifetime of on-and-off drug use. Opinions of Davis differ wildly, even among those who knew him, and these divergences, combined with his own tendency toward evasiveness during interviews, makes separating the man from the myth a daunting task. Szwed (Anthropology/Yale; Space Is the Place, 1997) succeeds admirably, however, exploring Davis’s music lucidly and knowledgeably and placing it in a critical and cultural context. His portrait of Davis the man is sympathetic without over-romanticizing the musician’s often troubled life.
For both casual fans and serious aficionados.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-85982-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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