Fans of Williams’ music will devour this all-encompassing work.
The man behind all those hummable scores.
“Actors may convey love in their facial expressions, or express suffering or panic in their eyes,” Greiving writes about movies, “but the music tells the ultimate truth and provides faith in these make-believe stories. The score—John Williams—is their soul.” In this first major biography of the beloved composer, Greiving, an arts journalist, meticulously traces Williams’ magical career, benefiting from more than 20 hours of interviews with his subject. The Williams family’s move from the East Coast to Los Angeles was life changing: In high school, Williams explored arranging, which laid the foundation for his composing, and in 1956 he secured a position at Columbia Pictures, playing piano on numerous B-movie scores. More orchestration opportunities turned up, including Gidget (1959) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). Live television also called; in 1958 he signed with Revue Studios, writing, orchestrating, and conducting 39 programs a year. Williams scored his first feature film, Daddy-O, in 1959, and later his own series, Checkmate, which led to his first Grammy-nominated album. One of his last studio pianist performances was for West Side Story. “John’s style and craft,” writes Greiving, took “a giant leap into maturity” with Emmy-winning Heidi and Goodbye Mr. Chips, and The Reivers “tapped into one of John’s superpowers: nostalgia.” In 1972 he won his first Academy Award, for Fiddler on the Roof. A year later, he wrote the score for The Sugarland Express, directed by a young new talent: Steven Spielberg. Meeting Spielberg, the composer said, was “one of the luckiest days of my life.” A bounty of successes followed, with Greiving charting the composer’s decades-long collaboration with Spielberg and, of course, George Lucas. The author provides reams of fascinating inside information about several spectacular scores, including the classics Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Schindler’s List.
Fans of Williams’ music will devour this all-encompassing work.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780197620885
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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