by Darden Asbury Pyron ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2000
Never mind, the flaws are minor and can be disregarded. Pyron tells an immensely entertaining story that should be...
An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans’ adoration was equaled only by his critics’ loathing.
“I cried all the way to the bank,” was Wladziu Valentino Liberace’s response to his many detractors. Historian Pyron (Southern Daughter, 1991) admits his initial reluctance taking on Liberace’s biography, but he came to respect the pianist as he learned more about him. He persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well a brilliant showman. His early conventional concerts usually received favorable notices, and many critics were enthusiastic. From his youth, however, Liberace had always preferred entertainment to recitals: thus his costumes and sets grew increasingly extravagant and he added popular music to his programs. This vulgarization, along with his frequently professed conservative midwestern values, proved too much for the high priests of 1950s Modernism. Led by the likes of Howard Taubman of the New York Times, critics lambasted Liberace wherever he appeared in reviews that were breathtakingly virulent. Many of his attackers, in those pre-Stonewall days, made astonishingly nasty allusions to his effeminate nature. Liberace, much liked by those who worked with him, took the broadsides mostly benignly, although he did sue and collect from the loathsome William “Cassandra” Connor (Britain’s answer to Westbrook Pegler) for a particularly vicious bit of homo-baiting. Pyron points out that, in the mid-1950s, for Liberace to have come out of the closet would have meant a certain end to his career: he thus did as much as he could (including lying under oath) to hide his proclivities. When simply narrating this uniquely American story, Pyron does a fine job, but he has an annoying tendency to make far-fetched allusions (e.g., to the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, as well as the Antinomian and Arminian heresies). In addition, Pyron is not terribly well-versed in classical music—and this leads to such gaffes as referring to pianist Earl Wilde as a jazz musician.
Never mind, the flaws are minor and can be disregarded. Pyron tells an immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture. (50 photographs, unseen)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-226-68667-1
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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