Big, heart-heavy bio of Garland that—though never stylish- -holds throughout. Shipman wrote the huge, chatty film history The Story of Cinema (1984). One wonders, starting out, what new stuff Shipman has dug up. Whole books study passages in Garland's life, such as the making of The Wizard of Oz and of A Star Is Born, and the shooting of her TV series. Must we settle for fresh dirt on her sex life? Yes, her bisexuality takes up a page or two; her husband/director Vincente Minnelli's homosexuality is scanned; and, at one point, we find Garland climbing into the back seat and fellating her gay hairdresser after she's failed to bring her driver to climax by hand. But such ginger-flavored passages are fairly rare. What we really get is the unbelievable downhill slide of a stupendous talent who could reduce seven thousand people at once to sloppy tears, even near her end. At the age of 12, she sang like ``a woman with a heart that had been hurt.'' Though a child, Garland outstripped her two older sisters in their stage act together. One wonderful night as an adult, when she ran out of encores, the audience sang ``Auld Lang Syne'' to her. Garland rises time and again here through death's trapdoor, each resurrection thrilling as she gets back up and rips out her heartstrings. This is a sad story: Pills, pills, pills, from girlhood on. Huge earnings, endless hospitals. Slit wrists, blamed on her mother, and teenage daughter Liza caring for Garland's crumbling ego. Tax problems, quarrels with film and TV studios, broken contracts, cancellations. Then the Big Cancel. If you can take it, it's a great story. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: June 10, 1993
ISBN: 1-56282-846-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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