Strictly for those who fetishize gaudy hotels, Mafia chic and sappy ballads.
The crooner who penned Frank Sinatra’s signature tune reminisces about the Rat Pack, the shifting landscape of popular music and the truth behind the phrase, “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.”
Reading Anka’s autobiography—written with Rolling Stone founding contributor Dalton (Who Is That Man?: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, 2012, etc.)—is a bit like hanging out poolside with a charismatic yet self-congratulatory uncle: fun for a few minutes, but ultimately you find yourself edging away as the man just keeps rambling about the good old days. Anka begins on solid enough ground, detailing his rise to teen-idol fame with the self-penned 1957 hit “Diana” and the ensuing package tours that found him rubbing elbows with Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. Into the early ’60s, Anka continued to score big hits, wisely intuiting that his career would last longer if he went the cabaret/casino route. When Beatlemania and psychedelia flooded the charts, he fully embraced the Rat Pack lifestyle and spent the ensuing decade gambling and drinking with Frank Sinatra (sweet when he wasn’t drinking, vicious when he was) and Sammy Davis Jr. (sweet whether he was drinking or not), as well as various mobsters, Saudi arms dealers and casino entrepreneurs. Now that Anka has outlived Sinatra, Davis and most of the mobsters, he understandably wants to crow about it—and crow he does, citing a veggies-and-exercise regimen for his longevity. Despite dishing out a few tidbits about high rollers like Donald Trump and Steve Wynn, Anka remains disappointingly mum about his fellow musicians and presents his tales in a remarkably slack, disorganized fashion.
Strictly for those who fetishize gaudy hotels, Mafia chic and sappy ballads.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-38104-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
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