Twice-told tales of two legendary Broadway lyricists. Citron (Noel and Cole, 1993, etc.) works chronologically: The first quarter of his text is pure Oscar Hammerstein (18951960) and the last quarter all Alan Jay Lerner (19181986); in between, he intercuts the stories but makes little attempt to relate them to each other. Despite some similarities, the two men had radically different personalities. Hammerstein was a moralist, an old- fashioned lyricist and librettist whose early work was in the accepted operetta style of the day. He had two extremely lucky breaks in his long career: One was an invitation to collaborate with Jerome Kern in 1927 on Show Boat, universally acclaimed as the first ``modern'' musical; the second was a late-in-life partnership with Richard Rodgers, beginning with the smash Oklahoma! (1943), which transformed him into a living legend. Lerner was a much more uneven and unpredictable worker. He benefitted from one important professional relationship, with Frederick Loewe, a Viennese-born composer who perfectly balanced Lerner's fiery temperament with his steadier musical hand; the duo are best remembered for My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960). While Hammerstein was a warm family man, genuinely loved by his colleagues, who had a lifetime of theatrical hits, Lerner passed through a slew of stormy marriages, battled a long addiction to amphetamines, and experienced a relatively short period of success. Citron offers insightful readings of both men's lyrics, as well as some interesting remarks about the evolution of their best-loved works. But his narrative is marred by awkward constructions (``all was not as bad as it might appear in the preceding paragraphs'') and oddly inappropriate clichÇs (``rumors...ran through the theater community faster than money through a drunkard's pockets''). Several previous books have already covered much the same biographical ground. Best read for its analysis of the songs; otherwise, little flesh on these bones. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508386-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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