An entertaining biography that circles the theater and taps into an important cultural movement.
Reid’s biographical debut ventures into the beating heart of the Harlem Renaissance through the life of his grandfather Leonard Harper.
Reid scoured historical archives to write this full account of Harper as a theater performer, choreographer, director and producer. Born the son of a poor singer in Birmingham, Ala., Harper performed on the street for pennies as a child. He became a talented performer, and after his father died, he studied soft-shoe in an effort to provide for his family. Reid writes of his grandfather at age 10: He “was now a first-class dancer who could tap rings around most of the adults and veteran masters. In other words, young Harper be boggity-boggity.” Reid continues with similarly charming turns of phrase as he shares the details of Harper’s exploits. Young Harper traveled with vaudeville shows until he found his way to New York, where he went solo at 16. By his early 20s, he found himself at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, and he worked with such legends as Duke Ellington, Florence Mills, Thomas “Fats” Waller and Louis Armstrong. Reid provides a straightforward account of the era’s racial tensions, with white producers often swindling Harper and his fellow African-American theater professionals out of the rights to their works. However, Harper was resourceful enough to successfully stage dozens of shows. Reid chronicles his barrier-breaking achievements, including his 1929 debut of Hot Chocolates, an African-American production that received great acclaim on Broadway. Though the book is full of praise for Harper, Reid also recounts his grandfather’s extramarital affairs and some of the more colorful stories of gangsters and burlesque dancers in the Harlem nightclub scene. While an unfortunate number of grammatical errors and clumsy run-on sentences distract from Reid’s careful research, dedicated theater and history buffs will happily brave the copy editing morass to access the wealth of information Reid has unearthed.
An entertaining biography that circles the theater and taps into an important cultural movement.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615678283
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dr. Grant Harper Reid
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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