An overly detailed biography that Lee’s die-hard fans will welcome.
The sad, troubled life of the popular jazz singer.
Peggy Lee (1920-2002), born Norma Deloris Egstrom, grew up in North Dakota, raised by an alcoholic father and mean stepmother. Yearning to be the center of attention, she wanted to be a movie star. By the time she was 15, she realized that her natural singing talent might get her out of the prairie. “She would have done anything to become famous,” a friend told music journalist Gavin (Deep in Dreams: The Long Night of Chet Baker, 2002, etc.). The author’s research is impressive: He has interviewed scores of people who knew Lee, worked with or for her, or witnessed her performances; he cites and assesses songs she recorded, performed and wrote; he follows her love affairs, however brief, and her four brief marriages. What he learns, however, proves repetitious: She was a vulnerable woman so frightened of performing that she downed a considerable amount of cognac before sweeping on stage; soon, alcohol was supplemented with Valium and Quaaludes. She was a demanding, selfish employer. She was deeply lonely. Her musicians, Gavin was told, “were her family….She kept them from leaving her after each show, which caused some problems with those who had wives or a life and didn’t want to hang out until the early morning hours.” On stage, she won praise for her “economy of movement.” She explained her stillness: “I just stood there because I was too scared to move.” She admired Billie Holiday, but the feeling was not mutual. She was a hypochondriac and a devotee of the Church of Religious Science, and she tried all manner of fad diets in an attempt to control her burgeoning weight. Her career had its ups and downs: Some of her songs—“Fever,” for example—made her famous, but some flopped.
An overly detailed biography that Lee’s die-hard fans will welcome.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1451641684
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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