There’s no magic, black or otherwise, in this cut-and-paste bio.
Lazy, hackneyed biography of the lounge act to end them all.
Former New York Times contributing reporter Clavin (Sir Walter: Walter Hagen and the Invention of Professional Golf, 2005, etc.) provides a gee-whiz look at singer-trumpeter Louis Prima’s Las Vegas heyday with spouse and musical partner Keely Smith. Enthralled by fellow New Orleans native Louis Armstrong, Italian-American Prima began his musical career in the 1920s and became a popular fixture at New York’s during the ’30s. Forced to break up his big band by changing tastes, Prima was down on his heels in 1954 when, out of desperation, he took a gig at the Sahara Hotel’s Casbar Lounge, doing five sets a night from midnight to 6 a.m. Rambunctious Prima, deadpan Smith and their high-voltage band quickly became the toast of Vegas, and they were recording stars pulling down a million-dollar salary by the time divorce broke up their act in 1961. Clavin appears utterly unqualified to parse Prima’s musical style, which combined the sound of the small black R&B combos, who rose during the ’40s as the big-band era waned, with his own Italianate repertoire and extroverted showmanship. The author also provides very few primary sources and offers no explanation of why Smith failed to sit down for an interview. Most of the material is dredged up from past tomes about Vegas’ showbiz and mob history, yellowing press clippings and previous film biographies of Prima. Extreme padding is evident in passages that catalog contemporaneous movie-house attractions and TV broadcasts for no apparent reason. The main narrative is larded further with threadbare recaps of Vegas’ history as a playground for Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and gangsters like Sam Giancana. Clavin’s fondness for cliché, idolatrous tone and unwillingness to supply even a glimmering of intelligent analysis make for torturous reading.
There’s no magic, black or otherwise, in this cut-and-paste bio.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-821-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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