Not really a biography, but an episodic social history centering on the life of ragtime composer Scott Joplin. Historian Curtis (Purdue; A Consuming Faith, not reviewed) has selected as her focus several key events in Joplin's life: his rural upbringing in Northern Texas; his undocumented visit to the 1903 St. Louis Exposition, where he may have performed; his years in Sedalia, Mo., where he created his greatest works; the Chicago World's Fair, another venue that he likely visited; and pre-WW I New York City. Part of the author's frustration (and the reader's) is what she calls Joplin's ``invisibility''; little documentary evidence, whether in Joplin's own hand or from contemporary newspaper accounts, survives to verify the often sketchy memories of his younger contemporaries. Curtis correctly states that part of the reason for Joplin's failure to leave much of a mark on his time was that he was a transitional figure, still subscribing to Victorian ideas of culture even as he announced a new musical world through his compositions. And she correctly notes the inherent racism in white America that denied Joplin performance opportunities or even much income from his work. But in analyzing Joplin's failure to leave a mark on either white or black culture, Curtis misses a fundamental point about his music: Joplin accepted the myth that European music was superior to his own ragtime and so wasted his last years toiling on the failed classical opera Treemonisha. The work's failure in both white and African-American communities was due to its old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century musical character, not to either racism or provincialism, as the author suggests. The text is also unfortunately marred by the author's use of trendy academic jargon. While it's refreshing to read a book about a popular musician written by someone with real credentials as a historian, Curtis sadly lacks enough knowledge about music to carry off her task.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8262-0949-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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