by Will Friedwald ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 29, 2002
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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