Denenberg constructs the tragedy of Elvis Presley’s life in a series of chapters that take their titles from rock and rockabilly songs. Part I covers 1935–58, from Elvis’s birth and hardscrabble childhood (“Tupelo Honey” to “Graceland”) to the long strange descent, (“Ain’t Got You” to “Trying to Get to Heaven”) masterminded mostly by the craven “Colonel” Tom Parker, 1959–77. Elvis’s family was genuine white trash and his feckless father and smothering mom set the stage for his complete failure at personal relationships for the rest of his life. His brilliant musical gifts, which shone so brightly in the Sun Studio recordings of Sam Phillips, were utterly dissipated as Parker manipulated him into bad music and worse movies in the name of almighty money. The genius of Denenberg’s approach is his use of language, a youthful-sounding echo of how Elvis himself might have told the story. The result is an extremely accessible account, filled not only with the details of a life (page after fascinating page), but the psychology of it as well. Young readers who only know the bloated caricature will come to understand how it was that he captured a generation, changed the history of music, and lost himself in a world of excess. (chronology, bibliography, videography, discography, filmography, index, photo credits, song credits) (Biography. 11-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-439-09504-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart.
Harrison has led a hard-knock life up until he’s taken in by loving foster parents “Coach” and Jennifer.
After he inadvertently causes the man’s death, Harrison is taken from a brutal foster home run by a farmer who uses foster kids as unpaid labor, a situation blithely ignored by the county. His new foster parents are different. Coach is in charge of the middle school football team, and all 13-year-old Harrison has ever wanted to do is to play football, the perfect outlet for his seething undercurrent of anger at life. Oversized for his age, he’s brilliant at the game but also over-the-top aggressive, until a hit makes his knee start aching—and then life deals him another devastating blow. The pain isn’t an injury but bone cancer. Many of the characters—loving friends Justin and Becky, bully Leo, a mean-spirited math teacher, cancer victim Marty and the major, an amputee veteran who comes to rehabilitate Harrison after life-changing surgery—are straight out of the playbook for maudlin middle-grade fiction. Nevertheless, this effort edges above trite because of well-depicted football scenes and the sheer force of Harrison himself. His altogether believable anger diminishes his likability but breathes life into an otherwise stock role.
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208956-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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