An extensive presentation of life on a bandstand and the man who blew his own horn that will be of special interest to jazz...
“The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” the embodiment of a leader of the big-band era, was actually a temperamental martinet of the age, says music biographer Levinson (September in the Rain, 2001, etc.).
Dorsey (1905–56) was a coal miner’s boy. He and his talented brother Jimmy were taught music by Pop Dorsey as a way out of the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania. The Dorsey Brothers traveled a long way, indeed: Gentle Jimmy, on the sax, may have been more talented, but younger Tommy, with his trombone, was the boss, able to shout louder and longer. For a while, they had a joint band, but fraternal altercations (in which they often demolished each other’s brass) ended that enterprise. With the heart of a latter-day corporate raider, firing players arbitrarily and stealing talent from other bands, Tommy went on to stardom and riches. Levinson knows the music business as it was practiced at the Birth of Swing. He follows Dorsey’s career from speakeasies, nightclubs and roadhouses through radio and movies. Here, from Bunny Berigan to Zeke Zarchy, are all the sidemen, band singers, band boys, agents and arrangers. (Perhaps the only missing personnel: Jan Garber, Ish Kabibbile). Featured are Buddy Rich and Ziggy Elman, Jackie Gleason and, up front, Frank Sinatra—with details about the notorious contract abrogation. The exhaustive catalogue of names and recording gigs occasionally smacks of liner notes gone wild, but the evocation of what was for many The Golden Age of Pop works as well as mere words, without the music, can.
An extensive presentation of life on a bandstand and the man who blew his own horn that will be of special interest to jazz buffs and swing groupies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-306-81111-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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