Informative, compelling and gleefully, unapologetically tendentious.
Sympathetic, admiring biography of the talent scout and record producer who helped propel into popularity such legendary performers as Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
In his debut, Prial begins and ends with his sighting of John Hammond (1910–87) at a 1984 Carnegie Hall concert. The author argues that Hammond was “eerily prescient” in his recognition of talent: “He seemed to know what America wanted to hear before America knew it.” Hammond came from big Vanderbilt bucks (on his mother’s side), but he dropped out of Yale to pursue his true love—jazz. Prial portrays him as an anomaly: a dapper white man (he invariably sported a blazer and a crew cut) who hung out in Harlem and befriended musicians who would become some of the biggest names in jazz history, including Holiday, Benny Goodman and Count Basie. Hammond was also a devoted leftist; many performers recall him sitting in a studio corner reading stacks of liberal/radical magazines, and he gained early fame writing about the Scottsboro case for the Nation. The author credits his subject for integrating popular music: It was Hammond’s constant lobbying that convinced Goodman, for example, to hire gifted black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to make his orchestra the first racially mixed band. A remarkably generous man as well, he never negotiated producer’s royalties and never expressed any subsequent regrets, despite the phenomenal success of some of his protégés. (A grateful Springsteen sang a Dylan song at his funeral.) Prial does not dwell on Hammond’s failed first marriage, nor on his reputation as “less than a doting father,” preferring to emphasize his professional achievements. He wasn’t a producer in the contemporary sense (his studio style was laissez-faire) and as a talent-meister he was occasionally wrong (the Nutty Squirrels never caught on), but the man who nurtured and promoted iconic artists from the 1930s through the ’80s gets from Prial the respect he deserves.
Informative, compelling and gleefully, unapologetically tendentious.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-11304-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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