by Ken Emerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2005
Under the boardwalk or up on the roof, this is a marvelous read.
The songsmiths of Broadway’s great hit factories get their due.
Stephen Foster’s biographer (Doo-Dah!, 1997) takes a welcome look at Foster’s 20th-century successors: the songwriters who toiled in humble cubicles at the Brill Building (1619 Broadway) and nearby 1650 Broadway, the hubs of New York’s music-publishing business during the heyday of ’50s and ’60s R&B, rock ’n’ roll and pop. He focuses on seven intertwined writing teams who often collaborated and competed with one another for cuts: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Emerson deftly shows how these prolific composers became ubiquitous figures in the music business of the day, and reveals the untold stories behind the composition of indelible tunes like “Be My Baby,” “Save the Last Dance For Me,” “Cryin’ in the Rain,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” and “Walk On By.” He doesn’t shrink from telling the writers’ personal stories, like the impact Pomus’s crippling polio had on his work or how marital tumult sundered the Goffin/King and Barry/Greenwich partnerships. He also spins interesting tales of such crucial players as publisher Don Kirshner and now-notorious producer-writer Phil Spector. These talents, Emerson notes, detonated rock’s first explosion through their versatility, their taste in sounds, ranging from classical music to R&B and Latin music, and sheer hard work. He charts their fortunes, cresting in the early ‘60s, and their swift fall, as the rise of performer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the migration of the business to the West Coast spelled an end to New York’s reign as music’s capital. The story of these writers is long-overdue in the telling, and Emerson tells it splendidly.
Under the boardwalk or up on the roof, this is a marvelous read.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03456-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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by Ken Emerson
by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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