A wide-ranging reassessment of Holiday’s work, best suited for Lady Day admirers.
An erudite fan attempts to reconstruct the life of singer Billie Holiday in a more positive light, by deconstructing her previous biographies.
Lady Day, who died more than 30 years ago, remains a romantic, tragic icon to jazz buffs. A Holiday devotee since childhood, Griffin (Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, 1999) offers an analysis that seeks to revise the singer’s image as victimized drug addict. Against the critics who contend that it was merely natural-born talent that led to Holiday’s success, Griffin argues that she was a disciplined, insightful musician who worked hard at her art. Holiday’s hapless public image has been shaped largely by her drug arrests and her autobiography (Lady Sings the Blues, later made into a film starring Diana Ross). Although Holiday collaborated in creating that myth, Griffin calls her “too complex to be contained by the tragic victim narrative.” Instead, she is depicted here as a worthy foremother for black women, compelling not only for her “musical genius” but also for her public dignity, courage, and determination. Moreover, she did not represent “maid, mammy or mother,” as black women usually did in the 1940s and ’50s. The author revisits familiar as well as more obscure biographies, magazine articles, documentaries, and recordings for evidence to shore up her arguments. She covers Holiday’s European experiences and reviews her appeal to both poets (the book title is taken from a poem by Rita Dove) and marketers of upscale products. A lengthy chapter is also devoted to actress/singer/poet Abbey Lincoln, seen admiringly as one of Holiday’s beneficiaries (as were Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, and such contemporary performers as Erykah Badu and Mary J. Blige). Classic photographs of Holiday—including the memorable Lady with the gardenia portrait—lead each chapter. There are also extensive endnotes, plus a list of recommended reading and listening.
A wide-ranging reassessment of Holiday’s work, best suited for Lady Day admirers.Pub Date: May 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86808-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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