From the golden boy knocking out songs in 15 minutes to the dying old man who kept working because it was the core of his...
From veteran biographer Secrest (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992, etc.), a serviceable portrait of the composer who was half of two of the American musical’s greatest teams.
Richard Rodgers (1902–79) played the piano by ear before he was in grade school, and in a Manhattan household filled with tense silences, music was the bond that knit together his cultivated Jewish family. When he was not yet 17, he teamed up with Lorenz Hart, whose tough, witty lyrics matched Rodgers’s warm, sparkling music to energize musical comedy in the 1920s and ’30s (A Connecticut Yankee, The Boys from Syracuse). Rodgers enjoyed a cushy, glamorous existence managed capably by his wife Dorothy, who tolerated his casual infidelities as the price for running all other aspects of their life. In the early ’40s, Rodgers finally split with the alcoholic and self-destructive Hart and joined Oscar Hammerstein to reach even greater commercial success with more serious (and often more sentimental) and carefully integrated musical plays. Secrest finds nothing new to say (understandably) about the revolutionary impact of Oklahoma! in 1943, but her work on Leonard Bernstein (1994) and Stephen Sondheim (1998) shows as she places Rodgers and Hammerstein within the context of American theater history, though tending to quote better-credentialed critics rather than offering her own opinions of shows like Carousel, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Making use of interviews with and memoirs by Rodgers’s family, friends, and colleagues, she limns a paradoxical personality: witty, gregarious, charming with professional contacts; yet frequently cold and critical, if not downright hostile, with wife and daughters.
From the golden boy knocking out songs in 15 minutes to the dying old man who kept working because it was the core of his being, Secrest is vivid in conveying Rodgers’s presence and his effect on those around him. If the wellsprings that powered his greatest songs remain mysterious, he might have preferred it that way.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40164-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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