A splendid catalogue of McPartland’s achievements, although readers may stumble in the great tangle of detail.
The story of the distinguished female jazz pianist who devoted herself to her art and won popularity, the respect of her colleagues and just about every honor the profession bestows.
There will not be a more richly detailed biography of McPartland (born in 1918 in Slough, England, as Margaret Marian Turner). McPartland has led an extraordinarily peripatetic life, and Seattle Times music writer de Barros seems to have been a stowaway in her luggage. He has very few negative observations: She could be crusty (especially later on); she didn’t like to read music; she sometimes had trouble keeping a consistent beat; not all her albums were good. Otherwise, this is a tribute to McPartland’s talent (she learned to play by ear as a girl), her determination to forge a career in jazz, her writing ability (she published in DownBeat and elsewhere) and her ongoing artistic evolution. The author also chronicles the serpentine route of her relationship with her American husband, the late cornetist Jimmy McPartland, whose drinking problems came and went—as did their ability to live together. She played with Jimmy from time to time but also had her own career—and her own love affairs, including a long-term one with legendary drummer Joe Morello. De Barros tells us about her albums (quoting the reviews—even the bad ones) and marvels at McPartland’s versatility and success with Piano Jazz, her NPR show that began in 1978. (The book’s title comes from her customary question to her guest on the show.) The author also charts her fierce devotion to jazz education and, sadly, her physical decline.
A splendid catalogue of McPartland’s achievements, although readers may stumble in the great tangle of detail.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-55803-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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