Like Bennett's catalog of music—you may not fall in love with each individual story, but it's hard to argue with the way...
The legendary master of the American songbook shares stories and lessons learned from a life in music.
As Bennett (The Good Life: The Autobiography of Tony Bennett, 1998) notes, Frank Sinatra called him "my favorite singer" on more than one occasion. The effect of this endorsement on Bennett’s career was, of course, enormous. From a generation of singers still inclined to refer to his work as "showbiz," Bennett's career has had a peerless longevity and has likely provided him with wisdom and anecdotes for two or three books of this nature. The stories are wide-ranging, calling on his relationships with the best-known jazz singers and musicians from the 20th century—stories of collaborations, disagreements and adventures. His passion for art, travel and learning also take the stage. Each chapter showcases what Bennett sees as the necessities for a successful life—e.g., respecting others, hard work, ignoring "trends," and focusing on what you know and love. Bennett is also willing to call bologna by its name when he sees it, and he decries what he calls the "flattening out" of the music industry and of the tendency to prioritize all aspects of the business aside from the quality of the music. Some of the "Zen" suggestions at the close of each chapter fall flat—e.g., there's nothing particularly useful in stating that the world will be a better place if everyone can learn to get along and appreciate each others' differences. There is, however, a great deal of wisdom in the suggestions when they stem directly from Bennett's own richly lived life.
Like Bennett's catalog of music—you may not fall in love with each individual story, but it's hard to argue with the way it's being told.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-220706-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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