Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.
Santoro (Stir It Up, 1997), who covers jazz and pop music for New York’s Daily News and The Nation, offers the first complete Mingus bio since the jazz legend’s death in 1979.
Mingus was larger than life itself. A big man physically, he was a swaggering tower of musical ingenuity and a mercurial, tempestuous personality. A key figure in post-bop, Mingus was one of the greatest bassists in the history of jazz, a brilliant composer and arranger who built on the innovations of Duke Ellington in his use of large ensembles (and the boppers in his play with form), while investing his music with a theatricality that few other musicians ever even attempt. For a guy who was often regarded as the possessor of a ferocious temper, he also inspired extraordinary loyalty, as Santoro’s book reminds readers. Based on over 100 interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, some of the most telling observations about Mingus come from men like Buddy Collette and Britt Woodman, who knew and loved him from their shared adolescence to his death. Certainly, as Santoro notes at the outset of this volume, Mingus had a “messy, sprawling life,” but a biography shouldn’t recapitulate those qualities and this one, regrettably, does. Santoro seems to think it necessary to recap every meal, every meeting, every rehearsal of Mingus’s life, mistaking exhaustiveness for insight. On the plus side, the author (a skillful music critic and a musician in his own right) is good at putting Mingus’s early years in L.A. in the context of that town’s vibrant, often underrated jazz scene, and its dark history of institutionalized racism. But too much space and time is taken up with canned cultural history that consists of machine-gun torrents of clichés and aperçus, spat out in generalizations that inadvertently obscure the context and chronology of Mingus’s career. And, frankly, there is a lot more of Mingus’s life than of his music in this book, much of it presented with a sort of unhealthy voyeuristic glee.
Given the subject matter and the author, one expects so much more than is delivered.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-509733-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
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
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