An enthusiastic portrayal of an iconic performer.
In a spectacular Las Vegas show, Elvis Presley (1935-1977) revived his flagging career.
Entertainment journalist Zoglin (Hope: Entertainer of the Century, 2014, etc.) uses Elvis’ 1969 comeback to recount a history of Las Vegas from 1931, when Nevada became the first state to legalize gambling, to its current iteration as a vacation destination boasting lavish, theme park–like hotels, designer shops, gourmet restaurants, blockbuster performers (Celine Dion, Elton John, and Lady Gaga, to name a few), and high-tech, hugely expensive extravaganzas, such as Cirque du Soleil. Before focusing on Elvis, the author reprises stories about “the boozing, macho Rat Pack” and many other headliners who drew crowds at the city’s glitziest hotel, the Sands. “Sinatra was the king,” Zoglin writes, “Vegas’s undisputed Most Valuable Player,” selling out his shows and attracting wealthy gamblers to the casinos. The 1960s, though, saw a “seismic shift, in music as well as in the rest of the culture”; along with the advent of rock ’n’ roll and the Beatles, tumultuous political events such as Vietnam, anti-war protests, and civil rights activism all affected the Vegas strip. Elvis, too, had gone through “a rough decade…in many ways a disastrous one.” His early trajectory to fame had been interrupted by two years of military service. When he returned in 1960, at the advice of his domineering manager Col. Tom Parker, he gave up live performing, instead appearing in a spate of lackluster movies. By 1969, writes the author, both Elvis and Parker agreed that he needed to return to the concert stage—beginning with Vegas. Drawing on scores of interviews, Zoglin paints a vibrant picture of Elvis’ thrilling, electrical presence: “everyone was dumbstruck,” one woman said. “It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.” Elvis’ performance, writes the author, “set a new standard for Las Vegas. The star was now his own spectacle.” Sadly, success proved brief: Less than a decade later, the star was dead.
An enthusiastic portrayal of an iconic performer.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5119-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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