Doc Pomus will always be cool; this book is a drag.
The colorful career of a songwriting master gets woeful treatment.
The saga of Brill Building-era songsmith Doc Pomus received a superior short-form recounting in Ken Emerson’s 2005 book Always Magic in the Air; this tome, which appears to owe a great deal to Emerson’s research, presents Pomus’ story in full-length, infuriatingly “novelistic” style. Born in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, Jerome Felder was crippled by polio at the age of six; as a teen, he immersed himself in black New York’s R&B and jazz nightlife, and, under the pseudonym Doc Pomus, he forged a career as a Big Joe Turner–styled blues shouter. He went on to pen hits for Turner and Ray Charles; in partnership with young collaborator Mort Shuman, he authored huge successes for talents as diverse as the Drifters, Dion, Elvis Presley and Andy Williams. Halberstadt’s narrative bogs down in the mid-’60s, when Pomus’ career collapsed after a divorce, his split with Shuman and the demise of Tin Pan Alley’s publishing empire following the arrival of Bob Dylan and other singer-songwriters. The story doesn’t regain momentum until its latter stages, when Pomus, after a hard-knocks decade as a professional gambler, returned to eminence co-writing with Dr. John. (Pomus died in 1991.) Halberstadt slathers on the color and presumes to know his subject’s interior life, but the work feels under-reported and emotionally untrue, and he evinces precious little understanding of what made the music tick. Worse, the book is clotted with factual and chronological errors: For instance, Pomus is depicted listening to Billie Holiday’s album Lady in Satin in 1957, a year before its release. And one hopes the publisher corrects the frequent misspellings of songwriting giant Jerry Leiber’s name. Most annoyingly, Pomus’ own voice is largely absent; known as a hipster’s hipster and a Rabelaisian storyteller, he is heard only in a few fascinating journal excerpts. The real Pomus takes a back seat to Halberstadt’s lugubrious, wannabe-hip prose and bogus interior monologizing.
Doc Pomus will always be cool; this book is a drag.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81300-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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