A fine general overview of one of the richest veins in American popular music.
Publishers Weekly review editor Rotella (Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria, 2003) presents an affectionate survey of the Italian songs and singers that have distinguished American popular music, with a particular focus on the period bracketed by World War II and the rock ’n’ roll revolution.
Frank Sinatra looms large in the narrative, along with contemporaries such as Dean Martin and Vic Damone, but the author devotes equal attention to largely forgotten stars, including Russ Columbo, a heartthrob to rival the great Sinatra; Nick Lucas, the first populizer of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”; and Julius La Rosa, who was infamously fired, on the air, from patron Arthur Godfrey’s program. Rotella offers a brief biographical sketch of each performer, along with insightful analyses of their varying styles, descriptions of their biggest hits and breakdowns of their particular constituencies. Along the way, he reminisces about his own experiences as the son of Italian immigrants and discourses on the traditional Italian values that informed the singers’ heady combination of macho swagger and gooey romanticism. Contemporary music fans may have trouble engaging with many of the Italian songs as described here, however, as the relentless lyrical focus on moon/spoon/June infatuation and heartbreak tends to blur the individual compositions into an undifferentiated mush. Chapters on such easy-listening stalwarts as the terminally laid-back Perry Como and vanilla crooner Jerry Vale are as bland as their subjects, and the reader longs for more material on the wild antics of Louis Prima, or fabled bad boys like Sinatra, Martin and Dion DiMucci. These cavils aside, Amore is a breezy, useful reference for those interested in exploring the subject. Rotella conducted interviews with many of the surviving subjects of the book, and his encounters with the likes of falsetto-wielding Lou Christie and doo-wop titan Johnny Maestro are full of charming anecdotes and period flavor.
A fine general overview of one of the richest veins in American popular music.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-698-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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