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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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