Not a pedestrian stroll past the crooner’s art, but frequently a pleasurable dance around some real pop culture. (20 b&w...
Told with feverish scat, the story of crooners in the days when vaudeville transformed itself into radio and the movies learned to talk, features a bio of Russ Columbo backed by Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallée, and an all-star supporting cast.
Music writer Kaye offers a hyperactive text, smooth as pomade, slick as showbiz. Fast-talking, over the top, he spills all he knows in extravagant novelistic style, often shifting tempo from past tense to present and devising Winchell-esque portmanteaus (“revusicals” in “glitteration”). It’s a bravura performance, and Kaye is adroit about music. A “thrush” tries to “fit a square peg into the song’s round voice box,” he notes, and a tenor holds his voice “stiffly in the neck, starched, like a collar.” There are fleeting snapshots of Rhythm Boy Crosby, the onetime drunk-tank inhabitant, whistling through the bridges; and cheerleader Vallée, the sometime vagabond lover, singing through his megaphone. There are Betty Boop and Flo Ziegfeld, Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman, Harry Richman, Benny Goodman, Freddy Chopin, Moran and Mack. Wandering throughout is Columbo, at the Brooklyn Paramount competing with Crosby playing Broadway’s Paramount; Columbo manipulated by Con, his con-artist manager; Columbo and the love of his life, Carole Lombard; Columbo suffering “death’s aloneliness,” silenced at 26, his music later recalled in a commemorative album by Tiny Tim. It’s true showbiz nostalgia, vamping and syncopated, punctuated regularly with really short sentences. Rim shots. A word. It’s a symphony of yellowed Variety clips, old sheet music, recording-studio notes, and movie dialogue. What might have been a lot of moonshine coming over a mountain of words ultimately works like a loving riff in a June moon canoe down a stream of consciousness.
Not a pedestrian stroll past the crooner’s art, but frequently a pleasurable dance around some real pop culture. (20 b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-46308-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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