This collection of 18 essays (including a 1945 plea for racial harmony by Sinatra himself), 13 of them new, is a mixed bag of superb musical and technical insight, interesting cultural studies analysis, and pure blather. In his concise and well-judged introduction, Mustazza (English and American Studies/Penn. State Univ.), the author of two previous books on the Chairman, makes a case for Sinatra as “an iconic hero” and promises a volume that will explore “the factors that led to the sculpting of the iconic Sinatra, and the nature of the changing culture that fashioned it.” The best (and longest) essay in the collection, written by Sinatra archivist Charles L. Granata, is a fascinating detailed recounting of Sinatra’s recording history, showing how he developed his mastery of song and the studio; rather than an academic analysis of pop culture, this is music history at its most sophisticated and, unlike most of the other contributions here, genuinely illuminates the art on which Sinatra’s reputation is based. By comparison, everything else in the book pales, but there are some notable offerings. Perhaps the most convincing and offbeat is Roger Gilbert’s essay placing Sinatra in the context of other —50s icons of troubled masculinity, Marlon Brando, Jackson Pollack, Robert Lowell, and Miles Davis. Although he has too little space here to completely develop the notion, Gilbert makes an interesting case for Sinatra as “the classic embodiment of fifties culture [who] fully articulated [the] contradictions, anxieties and ambivalences” of maleness in that decade. Those contributors who focus directly on the music—Will Friedwald and Richard Iaconelli among them—have the most to offer. Other essays border on the embarrassing; the worst is a stunning piece of self-aggrandizement by psychiatrist Lloyd L. Spencer. The Granata essay is almost worth the price of this volume. If he ever writes a Sinatra book, it will be one to look for.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-275-96495-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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