A vivid montage of American pop at its peak.
GQ contributing editor Richmond gives the great singer-composer her due.
Perhaps because Peggy Lee (1920–2002) sang with deceptive ease, her artistry has received less critical attention than that of such peers as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Her biographer here rights that wrong. Richmond finds Lee’s life and talent taking root in pain; she grew up in North Dakota during the Depression under stress from an alcoholic father and a physically and verbally abusive stepmother. To escape, Lee turned to singing. In strong scenes that evoke America’s golden age of popular song, the author traces her career. Lee sang first on radio, then with big bands; her style eventually emerged under the tutelage of a dour Benny Goodman. Work with the King of Swing also led to marriage with guitarist Dave Barbour. The two composed the hits “Mañana” and “It’s a Good Day,” songs with a carefree attitude that belied the turbulence of their relationship. Eventually, Barbour’s alcoholism and moody, jealous behavior helped end the union. As three successive marriages also collapsed, Lee made work the center of her life. Richmond assesses her career—decades of recordings, club and television appearances, some film acting—in meticulous, detailed critiques. He cites as Lee’s hallmarks impeccable taste, flawless timing and intense personal involvement with her music. He also describes the mercurial temper of a diva. As hospital attendants wheeled Lee towards the operating room for heart surgery, she berated a devoted musical director for usurping her authority by handing out checks to her band. He forgave her. After all, no one sang “Fever,” “Is That All There Is?” and “The Folks who Live on the Hill” as stunningly as she.
A vivid montage of American pop at its peak.Pub Date: April 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7383-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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