Memoirs, gossip, music history, and a little New Age philosophy from this noted cabaret star. Feinstein has made his mark on the musical world as a champion of the ``Golden Age'' of pop song. Here he traces his life from childhood in Columbus, Ohio, through a series of fortuitous accidents that led him to be employed as archivist/companion to Ira Gershwin during the last six years of the famed lyricist's life. Gershwin provided Feinstein with a deep understanding of the process of popular songwriting, and Feinstein was able to use his position as a building block in his subsequent career. The book has many amusing anecdotes about Gershwin in his semi-bedridden state, along with his ``barracuda'' of a wife, who lavished gifts on the young Feinstein while plotting his downfall. As Gershwin's representative, he helped oversee Tommy Tune's revival of My One and Only, although Feinstein's purist tendencies annoyed both the star and the producers, who were more interested in scoring a hit than honoring the exact intentions of the music's creators. In between recounting his ``life with Ira,'' Feinstein gives a thumbnail history of popular song, telling anecdotes about other notable composers, including Harry Warren (whom he also knew) and Irving Berlin (whom he did not). A bizarre undercurrent based on Feinstein's belief in ``the healing power of music'' reaches its nadir in his interpretation of Ira Gershwin's rather lame song ``Sunny Disposish'' as a philosophical treatise on the powers of ``natural healing [as espoused by] Norman Cousins [and] Deepak Chopra.'' Although Feinstein makes no bones about the singers he dislikes (including Frank Sinatra and Mel TormÇ, whom he calls ``Melismatic Torment''), he does not have the courage to let his criticisms stand unamended, often apologizing after smearing the offending crooner. S'readable and and fans will think that s'enjoyable, if not exactly that s'wonderful. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6093-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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