by William G. Hyland ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1998
Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs, continues his exploration of the giants of American popular song, begun in The Song Is Ended (1995), with a biography of the man who may have been the greatest of them all. Richard Rodgers was in many ways unique among the great composers of American theater music. He enjoyed lengthy partnerships with two very different lyricists of the first caliber, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. He established himself not only as a great songwriter but as a highly regarded composer of soundtrack music, winning awards for his scores for Victory at Sea and The Valiant Years. His career—after some inconclusive noodling around after college—consisted of an ever-upward trajectory with few bumps along the way until he was well into his 50s. And unlike the other great Jewish tunesmiths who dominated the Broadway stage in the golden era of musical theater, he was the product of a well-to-do family, never experiencing poverty, never struggling for his next dollar. The last two facts may go some way in explaining why Hyland’s new biography of Rodgers is such a dull read: There just isn’t much drama in this life. On the other hand, Hyland doesn’t help himself with his approach, an awkward veering between biographical detail and musical analysis that is too perfunctory with both. As a result, one never has much sense of Rodgers as a personality, despite lengthy descriptions of his behavior and attitude toward colleagues and friends, nor much understanding of what made him such a fine composer. Nor does Hyland really give much context for the innovations of Rodgers’s work with each of his great partners. The book is constructed entirely out of library research, with no interviewing, and it has the musty air of the library throughout. Intelligent, but utterly lifeless. (17 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07115-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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