Goodman (1909-86) bestrides the Swing Era in this stirring portrait that focuses largely on the clarinetist's wonder years during the 30's and 40's—though his childhood as a musical prodigy and his later years following the death of the big bands get their due. Firestone's bio (following his coauthored lives of Diahann Carroll, Gary Crosby, and Elizabeth Ashley) is livelier and more readable than James Lincoln Collier's Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (1989), though Collier (a professional horn player) gave a richer analysis of the music. The Goodman story swings here—partly because of changes in Goodman's odd, often thorny character, and partly because readers may dig out records to swing along with Goodman, Harry James, and the other greats blowing on these pages (in 1933 alone, Goodman cut over 250 sides). Born into the Chicago slums as the ninth of 12 children, Goodman spent his early years in dire poverty, with his Jewish father at times having to shovel swine guts in the meatpacking factories. At ten, the clarinet became the boy's escape hatch. Not only was he a prodigy, he practiced incessantly to achieve perfection and, in later years, when he formed his own band, he rehearsed prodigiously and demanded perfection from his players. Goodman's terrible glance at a player who fluffed a note or had a bad intonation was called ``the X- ray''—or just ``the Ray.'' For years, the band business was unstable and, perhaps unconsciously, Goodman feared the bottom would drop out and plunge him back into poverty. As his swing band rose to number one, climaxing with 1938's famed Carnegie Hall concert, he grew ever more tense and demanding, firing and hiring willy-nilly—and remained so until the end of his life. Much of the story's energy comes from Goodman's hunger for hot swing and his love of killer-diller arrangements that, alas, the dance halls hated—posing the steady threat of disbanding. Benny blows—and the angels sing.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03371-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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