Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.
A crooner’s breezy memoir.
Damone looks back at his life and career, recalling his Depression-era Brooklyn boyhood and his vertiginous trajectory up the pop charts and into the inner circle of the Rat Pack—as well as the arms of some of Hollywood’s most glamorous sirens. Born Vito Farinola in 1928, Damone grew up in Bensonhurst, displaying from earliest childhood a precocious singing ability that led to appearances on local radio programs. He found work as an usher at New York’s legendary Paramount Theater, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Perry Como and Tommy Dorsey, who encouraged the young man in his ambitions. In 1947, the 19-year-old Damone justified his early promise by scoring the massive hit “I Only Have But One Heart.” In the ensuing years, he enjoyed success as a pop singer but never attained the superstar status of buddies Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Damone admits to a marked diffidence regarding celebrity and careerism, which is to the book’s benefit. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, his perspective on his colleagues is refreshingly clear-eyed—though he clearly hero-worships Sinatra, an early supporter and lifelong pal. The author had an eventful private life, and he offers tales of vengeful mobsters, celebrity heartbreak and carousing in Las Vegas at the height of its glamour. The much-married Damone counts the beautiful Italian movie star Pier Angeli and the American singer/actress Diahann Carroll among his former brides, and he dated both Elizabeth Taylor and, on one memorably drunken occasion, Ava Gardner. Damone speaks eloquently about his passion for golf and his conversion to the Baha’i faith, but he is best on the subject of music. A consummate technician, Damone authoritatively analyzes breath control, lyrical interpretation and other aspects of the singer’s art.
Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57025-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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