This look at the life of one of this century's great personalities eschews meticulousness in its musical analysis in favor of a complete look at the man himself. Biographer Bergreen (As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, 1990, etc.) follows New Orleans's greatest from cradle to grave, as he travels to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Hollywood promoting jazz—the music he helped create. Along the way, we get colorful depictions of Armstrong's introduction to horn playing (he was the bugler at a reform school), the hard-drinking mother who taught him to hold his liquor, and the ``cutting contests''- -horn-playing competitions—in which he competed his entire life. Armstrong's career spanned many decades, and for much of that time he was a tireless performer and a frequent collaborator with other jazz greats, among them Charles Mingus, Earl ``Fatha'' Hines, and late in life, Ella Fitzgerald. As New Orleans jazz gave way first to swing and then to bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among other musicians, dismissed Armstrong as old hat. Armstrong outlasted their dismissal, and many later came to value his distinctive, resilient, subtle style. Armstrong knew some shady figures, including his manager Joe Glaser, who fleeced the trumpeter for millions, and gangster Dutch Schultz, whose feud with Al Capone over ``rights'' to Louis forced the musician into exile for fear of his life. The most vivid element here is Armstrong's own words. Despite only a fifth-grade education, Louis was a prolific and talented writer with a flair for metaphor (``In less than two hours I would be broker than the Ten Commandments'') and an almost alarmingly confessional style regarding his sex life and heavy but apparently never abusive use of marijuana. The presence of Armstrong's unique voice turns what might have otherwise been a routine biography into a grand success. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-06768-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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