A simple, successful portrayal of an award-winning but humble artist.
Raymond offers a debut novel that tells the life story of famed film composer Henry Mancini.
Mancini is born in 1924 to Italian immigrants and grows up in a Pennsylvania steel town during the Depression. His father, Quinto, a “piccolo flute-playing steel worker,” is his first music teacher, training him in classical music and Italian folk songs—but Mancini truly loves ragtime and jazz. His forte is arrangement and improvisation, which earns him a spot at the Juilliard School; in his audition, he performs a “‘fantasy on Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ ” which Raymond describes as “five minutes of pure musical genius filled with wonderful grace notes—those non-essential but inspired additions.” Soon after, he joins an Army band (and is lucky to return home from World War II unscathed), tours the United States as a professional band member, and eventually marries and settles in California. There, he’s hired by Universal Pictures as a staff composer and learns to work in a variety of musical genres. He later gets his big break after a chance encounter with director Blake Edwards, who asks him to score a new TV show: Peter Gunn. “Moon River,” The Pink Panther theme, and various other successful works follow. Raymond’s obvious intention in this fictionalized portrayal is to show her subject in a highly positive light. After all, this book is an entry in the Mentoris Project, a series about trailblazing Italians and Italian-Americans, which frames its subjects as role models. For instance, the author quotes popular singer Andy Williams as saying that Mancini was “one of the nicest men I have ever known,” and she writes that the composer’s peers were generally “inspired by how down to earth he was.” As a result, readers will indeed come away liking Mancini as a person. However, his flaws, if any exist, are left unexamined, so readers looking to read about the life of a tortured artist should look elsewhere. Overall, though, Raymond mostly avoids lionization, painting a low-key look at a kind and modest man with an impressive work ethic.
A simple, successful portrayal of an award-winning but humble artist.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-14-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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