Late Satch gets a deep look, but Riccardi’s main theses remain unproven.
The second half of the trumpeter-singer’s career receives a thorough but uneven chronicle.
The story told by Armstrong blogger and jazz pianist Riccardi will be familiar to readers of Terry Teachout’s graceful 2009 bio Pops. Riccardi takes up the musician’s career in 1947, when he formed his long-running combo the All Stars. The author styles his work as a defense of latter-day Satchmo. Armstrong was criticized for vaudevillian tendencies and sticking to a stale repertoire while leaning on pop material in later years, and reviled for his ever-ingratiating onstage demeanor, which was viewed as “handkerchief-head” Uncle Tom antics during the rise of the civil-rights movement. While Riccardi makes a compelling case for Pops as an all-around entertainer who scored major hits with unlikely material like “Mack the Knife” and “Hello, Dolly,” some musician sources testify that they could leave the band for years and return to find its set unchanged. Armstrong’s status as a black celebrity is more problematic, and complicated by his position as an informal goodwill ambassador on his many tours abroad. Though he was never servile, his symbiotic relationship with his bare-knuckled white manager Joe Glaser, who acted as protector, slave master and bank teller, is a troublesome part of the story. Even when Armstrong spoke out about race relations—as he did in 1957, when he chastised President Eisenhower for his handling of school desegregation in Arkansas—he came under fire from both bigots and blacks. In the end, Armstrong was a compulsive performer who allowed himself to be literally worked to death at the age of 69 in 1971. Riccardi recounts his tale in sometimes excessive detail; unsifted mountains of source material leave newly unearthed gems like a priceless letter from Armstrong to Glaser about marijuana somewhat lost in the shuffle. The smitten writer is also unable to resist the use of superlatives, and his constant abuse of the word “arguably” may make readers want to rap his knuckles with a ruler.
Late Satch gets a deep look, but Riccardi’s main theses remain unproven.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-37844-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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