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 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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