Though this is putatively Nica’s story, neither the author nor readers can long avert attention from mesmerizing Monk and...
Music historian and educator Kastin (I Hear America Singing: An Introduction to Popular Music, 2001) narrates the life of Kathleen Annie Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild (1913–1988), an heiress who fell in love with American jazz and soon became a sort of fairy godmother to some of the form’s greatest names, principally Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
The author begins with the most controversial moment in Nica’s life: the shocking death in 1955 of Parker, 34, in her New York hotel room. The event propelled her onto the front pages and raised many eyebrows (including, respectfully, Kastin’s, who doubts Nica had sexual relations with her musician friends). The author is stymied throughout by the reluctance of Nica’s children to grant interviews—or even to permit access to their mother’s rich archive of recordings and papers. But he goes with what he has, which is considerable. Kastin chronicles the rise of the Rothschilds, Nica’s family, her marriage, notable service in World War II, motherhood, divorce and her absolute devotion to jazz—and to the many musicians she befriended and subsidized. Night after night, she parked her Rolls (later, a Bentley) outside the clubs; she opened her hotel rooms and (later) her house to all-night jam sessions; she helped rescue Monk from oblivion, saw him enjoy a long period of soaring popularity, endured and supported him during his various psychological crises and allowed him to board for protracted times with her. Along the way, Kastin introduces us to just about every major figure in American jazz (Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Art Blakey et al.)—and a few notable fans as well (Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein, among others).
Though this is putatively Nica’s story, neither the author nor readers can long avert attention from mesmerizing Monk and the other Olympians of bebop.Pub Date: June 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06940-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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