Less-than-satisfying biography of a well-beloved jazz singer, despite some interesting musical analysis. Nicholson (Ella Fitzgerald, 1994) has uncovered birth certificates, court documents, and newspaper advertisements to correct long-standing mix-ups in Holiday's life story. His sober approach is some relief after the overheated prose of many Holiday bios (most notably, Donald Clarke's 1994 tome), but surprisingly, Nicholson drops the ball so often that those who do not already know Holiday's life story will be lost. Holiday was born out of wedlock, neglected by her mother, and raped by a neighborhood boy at the age of 11. By her late teens, she was in New York City, where she quickly established herself as a singing star, ``discovered'' by the famous jazz producer John Hammond, who arranged for her first recording sessions. An engagement at New York's hip Cafe Society club in the late '30s established her among a broader audience; there she performed ``Strange Fruit,'' a song that bravely addressed racial hatred. By the '40s, Holiday was recording in a more pop-oriented vein, often accompanied by lush strings. Her career began to unravel with her deepening dependency on abusive men and her addiction to heroin. By the early '50s, her voice was becoming unreliable, and her health began to fail; she died in 1959. Nicholson deals only peripherally with the personal life of Holiday, often only briefly mentioning key figures. As in his book on Fitzgerald, he tends to focus on long lists of performance and recording dates, losing sight of the figure behind the facts. His discussion of the musical side of Holiday's achievement is the book's most valuable contribution, offering interesting insights into how pop singers mold their image before an adoring public. This Lady is still waiting for her Day in the biographical sun. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1995
ISBN: 1-55553-248-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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