This weighty but incomplete work is a blown opportunity that never succeeds in getting inside a gifted and tragic...
The tempestuous life of a versatile singer gets a detail-heavy if unenlightening full-length treatment.
Dinah Washington has long been a suitable and unjustly neglected subject for a biography: The singer distinguished herself in the R&B, blues, jazz, and pop fields before her death at 39 in 1963. Cohodas (Spinning Blues Into Gold, 2000, etc.) has taken on the task, but she manages to bury her subject under an avalanche of unsifted research. Cohodas has unearthed a prodigious mountain of facts about Washington's life: Few press clippings about the vocalist's 20-year career appear to have gone unperused. The Queen of the Jukeboxes' ascent—from her bow with Lionel Hampton's band in 1943 through her long run as a solo star on Mercury Records, culminating in her major 1959 pop hit “What a Diff'rence a Day Makes”—gets session-by-session, gig-by-gig treatment. However, over the course of more than 450 pages of narrative, the pileup of data, drawn from trade publications, jazz journals, and daily papers, adds up to little more than an unnecessarily minutiae-laden itinerary. If the writer's primary interview sources supplied any illuminating reflections, they prove elusive here. Frustratingly, Cohodas never manages to figure out what made her subject tick. How did teenage gospel-music luminary Ruth Jones become Dinah Washington, a profane, promiscuous, pistol-packing, pill-popping doyenne of all things hip? Why did she marry seven times, often to shiftless and violent men? What abiding unhappiness led to her growing dependence on drugs, which climaxed with her death from an apparently accidental overdose of barbiturates? The reader never finds out. Cohodas is a graceless writer with no feel for the nuances of vocal or instrumental performance. Worse, in her needlessly fussy day-to-day approach, she supplies hardly an iota of intelligent analysis about the singer's creative impulses or internal life.
This weighty but incomplete work is a blown opportunity that never succeeds in getting inside a gifted and tragic performer's head, heart, or soul.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42148-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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