A knowledgeable treasure trove for popular-music buffs.
Music historian Friedwald (Sinatra! The Song Is You, 1995, etc.) takes a detailed look at a dozen of America’s best-loved pop standards.
Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of jazz and popular music, Friedwald profiles longtime favorites “Star Dust,” “St. Louis Blues,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Mack the Knife,” “Ol’ Man River,” “Body and Soul,” “I Got Rhythm,” “As Time Goes By,” “Night and Day,” “Stormy Weather,” “Summertime,” and “Lush Life.” These “biographies” brim with life and welcome information. Mixing backstage arcana with broader strokes of cultural history, they reveal both the intricacies of creation—authorship, arrangement, performance, recording—as well as each title’s larger cultural significance. Along the way, Friedwald provides insights into the lives of a veritable Who’s Who of American composers and musicians: Hoagy Carmichael, Oscar Hammerstein, Ethel Waters, Nat King Cole, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong; virtually every singer, lyricist, producer, and bandleader active in American music during the first half of the 20th century makes an appearance here. The author has tracked down most recorded examples of these songs, which were written between 1914 and 1938 but have been performed ever since, and in a short addendum to each chapter entitled “Bonus Tracks” offers knowledgeable evaluations. He also delineates how many of them found their way to Broadway and Hollywood as featured tunes in popular musicals and movies, offering convincing support for his premise that popular songs are almost living characters in American culture. To the author’s credit, his text eschews the kind of gossip that characterizes much other writing about pop music, although some of the more businesslike passages about key changes, chording, and arranging are so technical they may actually make readers wish for “a glimpse of stocking.” He describes the songs and performances with such infectious enthusiasm, however, that this is bound to inspire some trips to the record store.
A knowledgeable treasure trove for popular-music buffs.Pub Date: April 29, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42089-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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