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INTRODUCING BERT WILLIAMS

Name: INTRODUCING BERT WILLIAMS
Author: Camille F. Forbes
ISBN: 978-0-465-02479-7

BURNT-CORK, BROADWAY, AND THE STORY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK STAR

by Camille F. Forbes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

A worthy, if a bit ponderous, contribution to entertainment history.

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A neglected titan of popular culture gets his due.

Forbes (Literature/Univ. of California, San Diego) presents the life and career of Bert Williams (1874–1922), a protean figure in American entertainment and the pre-eminent black performer—arguably one of the most popular comedians of any hue—of the early 20th century. She charts with scholarly earnestness Williams’s path from the island of Antigua through his partnership with the similarly talented and driven George Walker to solo success. Williams performed in burnt-cork blackface and in performance embraced such racial stereotypes as “the coon”; his biographer’s treatment of the difficult subject of minstrelsy is trenchant and insightful. Unfortunately, Forbes’s academic prose is dryly analytical and somewhat soporific as she doggedly catalogues Williams’s successes, defeats and social milieu. Still, this electrifying performer remains an underaddressed subject, and Forbes’s diligence yields much of value. A wealth of detail illuminates the evolution of show business during Williams’s era, and the artist himself is quoted at length, revealing an articulate and thoughtful man beneath the burnt cork. Forbes also covers Williams’s contribution to popular music. He was the bestselling black recording artist before 1920, and his massive hit “Nobody” demonstrated a keen understanding of the mechanics and evanescent effects of song. When Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies, it cemented his status as a superstar whose appeal transcended race. He became one of Columbia Records’s consistent top sellers, free at last from the degrading “coon” tropes that had defined his early career. Among his colleagues in those heady days were Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and W.C. Fields, who called Williams “the funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest man I ever knew.”

A worthy, if a bit ponderous, contribution to entertainment history.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-465-02479-7

Page Count: 358

Publisher: Basic Civitas

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)