“Ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you,” goes one Hart lyric that now, thanks to the author’s thorough, affectionate research,...
The author of The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (2007) returns with a deeply sympathetic biography of Lorenz Hart (1895–1943), the talented, troubled lyricist of film and Broadway fame.
Marmorstein, who has published often about the popular arts, has done an enormous service for fans of stage and movie musicals of the early decades of the 20th century. Here, the author details Hart’s short life, explores his most productive professional partnership with composer Richard Rodgers, chronicles his descent into the alcoholism that killed him, speculates about his sexuality (his colleagues knew he was gay; the public did not), and provides numerous examples of Hart’s witty, sometimes risqué lyrics (risqué, of course, by 1940s standards). Hart, whose adult height perhaps touched 5 feet and who seemed always to have a cigar, wrote some 800 songs with Rodgers, many of which are Broadway classics, among them “Manhattan,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Where or When.” But Hart was a psychological mess. Perhaps due to his height (a constant joke about him in the press, and even from Rodgers’ mouth) or his sexuality (frequently he would disappear in the evenings) or the enormous pressure to write on quick deadlines, Hart became so increasingly unreliable that Rodgers approached Oscar Hammerstein II to write the lyrics for the show that would become Oklahoma! Hart subsequently wrote only a handful of songs. Marmorstein often summarizes the shows of Rodgers and Hart (routinely referring to them as “the boys”), sometimes too thoroughly, and there are so many interesting characters on his stage—like Cole Porter and George Abbott—that occasionally he loses track of Hart, who, sadly, left few intimate documents, excepting, of course, those wondrous words.
“Ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you,” goes one Hart lyric that now, thanks to the author’s thorough, affectionate research, holds another, profoundly poignant meaning.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9425-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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