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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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