Late Satch gets a deep look, but Riccardi’s main theses remain unproven.
The second half of the trumpeter-singer’s career receives a thorough but uneven chronicle.
The story told by Armstrong blogger and jazz pianist Riccardi will be familiar to readers of Terry Teachout’s graceful 2009 bio Pops. Riccardi takes up the musician’s career in 1947, when he formed his long-running combo the All Stars. The author styles his work as a defense of latter-day Satchmo. Armstrong was criticized for vaudevillian tendencies and sticking to a stale repertoire while leaning on pop material in later years, and reviled for his ever-ingratiating onstage demeanor, which was viewed as “handkerchief-head” Uncle Tom antics during the rise of the civil-rights movement. While Riccardi makes a compelling case for Pops as an all-around entertainer who scored major hits with unlikely material like “Mack the Knife” and “Hello, Dolly,” some musician sources testify that they could leave the band for years and return to find its set unchanged. Armstrong’s status as a black celebrity is more problematic, and complicated by his position as an informal goodwill ambassador on his many tours abroad. Though he was never servile, his symbiotic relationship with his bare-knuckled white manager Joe Glaser, who acted as protector, slave master and bank teller, is a troublesome part of the story. Even when Armstrong spoke out about race relations—as he did in 1957, when he chastised President Eisenhower for his handling of school desegregation in Arkansas—he came under fire from both bigots and blacks. In the end, Armstrong was a compulsive performer who allowed himself to be literally worked to death at the age of 69 in 1971. Riccardi recounts his tale in sometimes excessive detail; unsifted mountains of source material leave newly unearthed gems like a priceless letter from Armstrong to Glaser about marijuana somewhat lost in the shuffle. The smitten writer is also unable to resist the use of superlatives, and his constant abuse of the word “arguably” may make readers want to rap his knuckles with a ruler.
Late Satch gets a deep look, but Riccardi’s main theses remain unproven.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-37844-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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