An adoringand at times vexingly detailedlook at one of pop music's most enduring and controversial icons. Friedwald (Jazz Singing, 1990) has collected enormous amounts of information on ``The Voice's'' career: interviews with Sinatra peers, discographic background, and an intimate familiarity with the entire Sinatra canon. Sorting all this information is a challenge at which Friedwald only partially succeeds. Most events and analyses of songs are treated in chronological order; Sinatra's various arrangers define phases of the singer's career, as evidenced in chapter titles such as ``With Axel Stordahl, 19431948.'' Friedwald is at his best when describing, with some technical depth, how a particular arranger colored Sinatra's music. Musicians will appreciate the author's informed appraisals, while lay listeners will glean enough not to get lost. Arrangers are often unsung heroes, and Friedwald gives greats like Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins their due. And many of the small details included will fascinate Sinatra fans: ``Fly Me to the Moon,'' for example, was the first music ever heard on the moon. However, at times Friedwald waxes on as if he were one of Frank's bobby-soxer fans, heaping praise on each syllable of Sinatra's phrasing and slowing the narrative turntable to a nauseating 16 rpms. The author's starry eyes miss much of Sinatra's bad behavior. And when he does recount some notorious outbursts, such as his punching out columnist Lee Mortimer in 1947 or calling an Australian journalist a whore in 1974, the author makes excuses for his hero. Reputed mob connections are only briefly alluded to. Sinatra! will appeal to those already under the master singer's spell but will probably not enlighten those with only a passing interest in Ol' Blue Eyesthe book reveals its subject without transcending it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19368-X
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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