A dynamic, if sometimes overly detailed, autobiographical debut.
A musician, playwright, dancer, and composer fondly remembers his lengthy, memorable life in musical theater.
Mathews was born to Catholic parents in Rockford, Illinois, in 1942, and he was named Ignatius Norman Cancelose, much to his chagrin; he’d change it later on. Mathews shares stories (which obviously tickle him) of his relatives’ amusement at his “incessant singing and dancing”; he enrolled in dancing school at age 4. He also had a distinct affinity for music and movies, which he would be exposed to during family day trips to Chicago. His accounts of his school experiences encompass all the insecurities and foibles inherent in the awkward adolescence of an unathletic but musically inclined young man. His burgeoning same-sex attraction directly challenged the teachings of his Catholic education, however, and the words of a local monsignor on the subject (“may God have mercy on your evil soul”) were psychologically damaging. However, Mathews followed his heart and focused his mind on two things: his theatrical aspirations and other young men. The wide variety of musical theater offerings in New York City in the late 1950s enchanted him further, and high school and college fortified Mathews with drama classes and ballet training, which further solidified his interest in the performing arts. He went on to land an editing position at Ballroom Dance Magazine, and from his mid-20s, his career in dance performance and musical theater began an incremental ascent. It would eventually include theatrical scores, playwriting ventures, and award-winning collaborations. However, a suicide attempt, insecurities about his sexuality, and health and career setbacks in the 1980s provided stumbling blocks along the way. The author, now 76, clearly delights in detailing his life story, starting with his Sicilian ancestry and his grandparents, who arrived in America via Ellis Island. He goes on to present his distinguished life on Broadway with all the glow of center stage and the nerve-wracking thrill of opening night. Overall, he delivers an alluring autobiography of a man “who wore enough hats to fill a millinery shop” thanks to a highly varied career that included editing, dancing, and musical composition. However, its verbosity does work against it at times; the author piles on expository details, particularly in the first half, which sometimes results in a sluggish pace. Still, many readers—and fans of classic Broadway musical theater, in particular—may find that they don’t mind the author’s long-windedness in the earlier sections, as they’ll gleefully discover that the book’s second half is fully stocked with accounts of stage shows galore—not to mention impressive name-dropping (Barbra Streisand, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Gene Kelly). These anecdotes from the theater’s social scene glide alongside vivid imagery from the author’s performances and other successes. The book also has a delightful, chatty sense of humor with moments of wry wit that make it exciting to read. In the end, it effectively celebrates a life of artistic inspiration alongside the giddiness and glory of live theater.
A dynamic, if sometimes overly detailed, autobiographical debut.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73236-710-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Eburn Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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