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 substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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