A sweeping and definitive reference work about Christmas songs.
A comprehensive guide to what seems like every Christmas song ever written.
In these pages, Mandeli provides complete breakdowns of over 1,000 Christmas songs. For every entry, he lists the name (or name variations) of the song, the creator and date of the composition (if known), and the specifics of different renditions, in addition to critical assessments of each performance. His chronicle begins centuries in the past and extends well into the 21st century, covering a wide variety of musical styles, from choral to symphonic to rock, blues, country, and, of course, gospel. In the context of gospel, the author diplomatically notes that Christmas is at heart a religious observance, though this need not discourage secular readers. “You don’t have to have Christian beliefs—and I am certainly not imposing them on anybody,” he writes. “I just explain what the song was meant to be about by its author.” Mandeli includes a plethora of pertinent (or just interesting) facts about each song’s origins and history, as when he notes that Tommie Connor’s 1952 tune “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was originally commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue to promote their Christmas cards that year (the Archdiocese of Boston, disliking that kissing business, initially condemned the song—until its 13-year-old singer, Jimmy Boyd, softened them up). The author also details the most memorable recorded renditions of the selections; his notes on Tchaikovsky’s 1892 march from The Nutcracker, for instance, start with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1935 single and end with the 2012 version by 101 Strings.
Mandeli is an unfailingly knowledgeable guide to and a generous judge of the vast mountain of music he discusses; his verdict on 1995’s “Every Year, Every Christmas” by Luther Vandross and Richard Marx—“A very unusual song that will make you ponder”—will strike some readers as hilariously charitable. The author provides consistently compelling stories connected to the songs, as when he discusses Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s 1943 song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and notes that when Frank Sinatra was recording it in 1957, he noticed one of the somber lyrics and said, “The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” The staggering extent of Mandeli’s research is most evident in the section of the book dealing with the oldest Christmas songs, in which the sheer number of renditions can be daunting. “Silent Night” is a good example: With 1816 lyrics by Josef Mohr and 1818 music by Franz Gruber, the beloved song, Mandeli notes, has appeared in more than 130,000 recordings in multiple languages (he quite rightly mentions that the version by Stevie Nicks is “outstanding”). Mandeli’s affably delivered commentary lends just the right note of charm to the entries, as when he says of Leroy Anderson’s 1949 “Sleigh Ride,” “I love the many instrumentals of this song, particularly the one performed by [Anderson],” or mentions that Little Big Town’s 2024 “Holiday” “expertly captures the sound” of the ’70s. The cumulative effect of reading through the many entries is a sense of wonder regarding the work’s all-encompassing completeness; Christmas aficionados of all stripes simply must consult this Herculean labor.
A sweeping and definitive reference work about Christmas songs.Pub Date: June 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798199636995
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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