Sforza attempts to examine the songs and success of the legendary Andrews Sisters, the vocal trio who in the 1940s rivaled crooners Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra as the most popular musical act in America. The Andrews Sisters (Maxene, LaVerne, and Patty) enjoyed a phenomenal run of success, from their 1937 hit “Bei Mir Bist Du Schîn” through their first breakup in 1953. During that time they placed over 100 songs on the Billboard magazine charts; headlined New York’s Paramount Theater (then the mecca of performing that Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden are today) more often than any other act; had their own radio show, The Andrews Sisters Show; and became motion picture stars (appearing in multiple pictures with Abbott & Costello, among others). As the numbers prove, they clearly were at the pinnacle of the show-business world. Unfortunately, Sforza relies almost exclusively on those numbers, which could be extracted from any number of sources, to tell their story. And given the legendary fighting among the three, Maxene’s controversial marriage to manager Lou Levy (who charged the sisters’ father, Olga, with threatening his life, largely because of anti-Semitism), and their various health problems, there is much more to the Andrews Sisters’ story than the numbers. Sforza makes some attempt to delve into these issues, but he is foiled by his lack of access to new first-hand evidence, for which he substitutes old newspaper articles, gossip reports, magazine stories, previously published interviews, whatever he can get his hands on. Nor does Sforza come across as a passionate fan. Instead of injecting his own voice, he is content with dry recitation: “The trio headlined at the Paramount with Mitchell Ayres and his orchestra during the summer months of 1943. . . . The trio then became series regulars on CBS’ s The Roma Wines Show, starring Mary Astor. . . . The trio’s last record release of the year was ‘Shoo Shoo Baby,’ which made Billboard’s top-ten list for sixteen weeks.” In such by-the-yard passages, Sforza seems to forget he’s writing about big-band music a generation of fans considered lively and fun. Given his lack of access to new material, and his lack of enthusiasm for the group, one wonders why Sforza even picked the Andrews Sisters as his subject matter. (28 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2136-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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