Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.
A crooner’s breezy memoir.
Damone looks back at his life and career, recalling his Depression-era Brooklyn boyhood and his vertiginous trajectory up the pop charts and into the inner circle of the Rat Pack—as well as the arms of some of Hollywood’s most glamorous sirens. Born Vito Farinola in 1928, Damone grew up in Bensonhurst, displaying from earliest childhood a precocious singing ability that led to appearances on local radio programs. He found work as an usher at New York’s legendary Paramount Theater, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Perry Como and Tommy Dorsey, who encouraged the young man in his ambitions. In 1947, the 19-year-old Damone justified his early promise by scoring the massive hit “I Only Have But One Heart.” In the ensuing years, he enjoyed success as a pop singer but never attained the superstar status of buddies Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Damone admits to a marked diffidence regarding celebrity and careerism, which is to the book’s benefit. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, his perspective on his colleagues is refreshingly clear-eyed—though he clearly hero-worships Sinatra, an early supporter and lifelong pal. The author had an eventful private life, and he offers tales of vengeful mobsters, celebrity heartbreak and carousing in Las Vegas at the height of its glamour. The much-married Damone counts the beautiful Italian movie star Pier Angeli and the American singer/actress Diahann Carroll among his former brides, and he dated both Elizabeth Taylor and, on one memorably drunken occasion, Ava Gardner. Damone speaks eloquently about his passion for golf and his conversion to the Baha’i faith, but he is best on the subject of music. A consummate technician, Damone authoritatively analyzes breath control, lyrical interpretation and other aspects of the singer’s art.
Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57025-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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 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
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