Furia, who has already attempted a general survey of the great American lyricists (Poets of Tin Pan Alley, 1990), turns his attention to the works of a giant of the field. There have been numerous biographies of Ira's brother, George, but the shy, quiet older sibling has been given short shrift by music and theater historians. Ira was a retiring, private man, a slow-working perfectionist who was nicknamed ``the Jeweller'' by his more mercurial brother; that, and his uneventful private life, have undoubtedly contributed to his neglect by all but a few scholars of the American popular song. Furia's (English/Univ. of Minnesota) book attempts to combine academic analysis of Ira's writing with an all-too-cursory recounting of his life. Granted, compared to the sexual shenanigans, relentless self-promotion, and sudden, tragic death of George, Ira's calm waters look like an unlikely place to go trolling for a good story. But as Furia points out in his introductory chapter, Ira Gershwin was not only one of our most prolific songwriters, working with almost every major American composer of theater musicKurt Weill, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and, of course, his brotherbut one of the key figures in the field, a man who ``took the American vernacular and made it sing.'' Regrettably, Furia's focus is almost entirely on the lyrics, and his analyses, while interesting, will probably prove too technical for the casual reader and insufficiently rigorous for the professional. One yearns for more insight into this charming and clever man who chose to hide his own light under his brother's not inconsiderable bushel. Ira was a master at breathing new life into old formulas with an urbane wit; Furia, unfortunately, is unable to do the same.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508299-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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