An adoringand at times vexingly detailedlook at one of pop music's most enduring and controversial icons. Friedwald (Jazz Singing, 1990) has collected enormous amounts of information on ``The Voice's'' career: interviews with Sinatra peers, discographic background, and an intimate familiarity with the entire Sinatra canon. Sorting all this information is a challenge at which Friedwald only partially succeeds. Most events and analyses of songs are treated in chronological order; Sinatra's various arrangers define phases of the singer's career, as evidenced in chapter titles such as ``With Axel Stordahl, 19431948.'' Friedwald is at his best when describing, with some technical depth, how a particular arranger colored Sinatra's music. Musicians will appreciate the author's informed appraisals, while lay listeners will glean enough not to get lost. Arrangers are often unsung heroes, and Friedwald gives greats like Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins their due. And many of the small details included will fascinate Sinatra fans: ``Fly Me to the Moon,'' for example, was the first music ever heard on the moon. However, at times Friedwald waxes on as if he were one of Frank's bobby-soxer fans, heaping praise on each syllable of Sinatra's phrasing and slowing the narrative turntable to a nauseating 16 rpms. The author's starry eyes miss much of Sinatra's bad behavior. And when he does recount some notorious outbursts, such as his punching out columnist Lee Mortimer in 1947 or calling an Australian journalist a whore in 1974, the author makes excuses for his hero. Reputed mob connections are only briefly alluded to. Sinatra! will appeal to those already under the master singer's spell but will probably not enlighten those with only a passing interest in Ol' Blue Eyesthe book reveals its subject without transcending it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19368-X
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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