Essential biographical guide to composer/bandleader Duke Ellington's music, analyzing its development year by year with sidebar essays on the best recordings. Hasse (Curator of American Music/Smithsonian Institution) relates Ellington's life largely as it ties in with the music. Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899-1974) was born to—and forever worshipped—the extremely beautiful, light-skinned Daisy Ellington, a primly refined Washingtonian, and to James Edward Ellington, once butler to a prominent doctor and at times caterer to events at the White House, who treated Daisy as a treasure, raised his family as if a millionaire, and dressed his son like a duke from his earliest years. Ellington said later, about his music, that ``my strongest influences, my inspirations, were all Negro''—but, as a child, sometimes the beauty of his mother's piano-playing caused him to burst into tears, and clearly the grain of his spirit came from his parents. Ellington forever broke new ground, never looked back or dwelled on his earlier music. Many—Hasse included—think him America's greatest composer, though the input of his sidemen and of fellow composer Billy Strayhorn must also be weighed in his accomplishments, from jungle music to the late cantatas. The 119 photos interspersed throughout the text boost immensely the rich atmosphere of Ellington's venues, including The Cotton Club and the tours that became the band's mainstay. Hasse follows closely the growth of the band and its orchestrations of its finest pieces- -``Creole Love Call,'' ``Mood Indigo,'' ``Sophisticated Lady,'' etc.—and their varied recordings over the decades. Brilliantly written. (Includes a select discography, filmography, and videography)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70387-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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