Readers get the scat but not the whole cat.
Jive-spouting bandleader gets a long-overdue first full-length biography.
The Times (London) jazz critic Shipton (I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh, 2009, etc.) takes a sometimes overly detailed and not always revealing look at the antic “Hi-De-Ho” man Cab Calloway (1907–1994), who burst onto the national scene in the early ’30s with his vocal hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Raised in Baltimore, Calloway followed in the musical footsteps of his sister Blanche, who became a revue star at Chicago’s Sunset Café, where Louis Armstrong also made his mark. Calloway quickly eclipsed his sibling with his extroverted singing and dancing—his players claimed that his bandleading relied more on miming than on musicianship—and he became a reigning hep cat in the early ’30s at New York’s Cotton Club. Within a few years, his band rivaled Duke Ellington’s orchestra in popularity, and he achieved crossover fame through film appearances (and some vocal shots in Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons). Calloway recorded prolifically through the late ’40s, when changes in musical fashion forced him to lead a small combo. He installed himself as a cultural institution in the ’50s and ’60s with appearances on stage in Porgy and Bess and Hello, Dolly! and on film in The Blues Brothers. Shipton labors mightily to make a case for Calloway’s abilities as a jazz leader whose groups included such great talents as Ben Webster, Milt Hinton and Gillespie (who was expelled after he cut his boss with a knife). However, it was Calloway’s novelty vocals that made him famous, and the author’s technical readings of recordings don’t offer convincing evidence to the contrary. Too often the book sags under the weight of gig details and band itineraries, and Shipton ultimately fails to supply any sense of his subject’s inner workings. Details of Calloway’s personal and family life usually take a back seat to the progress of his musical career.
Readers get the scat but not the whole cat.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-514153-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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