Not a pedestrian stroll past the crooner’s art, but frequently a pleasurable dance around some real pop culture. (20 b&w...
Told with feverish scat, the story of crooners in the days when vaudeville transformed itself into radio and the movies learned to talk, features a bio of Russ Columbo backed by Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallée, and an all-star supporting cast.
Music writer Kaye offers a hyperactive text, smooth as pomade, slick as showbiz. Fast-talking, over the top, he spills all he knows in extravagant novelistic style, often shifting tempo from past tense to present and devising Winchell-esque portmanteaus (“revusicals” in “glitteration”). It’s a bravura performance, and Kaye is adroit about music. A “thrush” tries to “fit a square peg into the song’s round voice box,” he notes, and a tenor holds his voice “stiffly in the neck, starched, like a collar.” There are fleeting snapshots of Rhythm Boy Crosby, the onetime drunk-tank inhabitant, whistling through the bridges; and cheerleader Vallée, the sometime vagabond lover, singing through his megaphone. There are Betty Boop and Flo Ziegfeld, Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman, Harry Richman, Benny Goodman, Freddy Chopin, Moran and Mack. Wandering throughout is Columbo, at the Brooklyn Paramount competing with Crosby playing Broadway’s Paramount; Columbo manipulated by Con, his con-artist manager; Columbo and the love of his life, Carole Lombard; Columbo suffering “death’s aloneliness,” silenced at 26, his music later recalled in a commemorative album by Tiny Tim. It’s true showbiz nostalgia, vamping and syncopated, punctuated regularly with really short sentences. Rim shots. A word. It’s a symphony of yellowed Variety clips, old sheet music, recording-studio notes, and movie dialogue. What might have been a lot of moonshine coming over a mountain of words ultimately works like a loving riff in a June moon canoe down a stream of consciousness.
Not a pedestrian stroll past the crooner’s art, but frequently a pleasurable dance around some real pop culture. (20 b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-46308-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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