by Jerry Blavat ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2011
Blavat spent the ’60s crafting a fast-talking, larger-than-life radio persona that attracted hordes of teens to the record...
A longtime disk jockey spins a stack of memories about rock, the mob and surviving the music business.
Blavat spent the ’60s crafting a fast-talking, larger-than-life radio persona that attracted hordes of teens to the record hops he hosted around Philadelphia. A sworn enemy of bubblegum and pop, he nicknamed himself the “Geator”—a portmanteau of “alligator” and “heater”—and assembled playlists stuffed with pugnacious rock ’n’ roll. (He once played the Beatles on air just to field angry phone calls, showing a friend how much he’d encouraged his fans to dislike them.) Experienced, successful and now apparently eager to boast a little, Blavat spends the early chapters of his debut memoir tracking his rise from hardscrabble Jewish-Italian stock and how music provided a way out. He became a star dancer on the American Bandstand, a local program before Dick Clark took it national; before he was out of his teens, he’d road-managed Danny and the Juniors and launched his DJ career. Fame got him plenty of attention, both in the music industry and with women—Blavat’s not shy about cataloging his sexual conquests. The author’s equally interested in paying homage to the A-listers he hung out with, and the book is larded with genial remembrances of Frank Sinatra, Joan Crawford and Sammy Davis Jr. In the ’80s and ’90s, Blavat’s acquaintances with mob types attracted the scrutiny of investigators; he was never charged with a crime, but he is compelled to clear his name regardless. That candor is admirable, but his narcissism, combined with his generally plodding prose style, saps much of the youthful energy of the early chapters.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7624-4215-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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