A deeply researched and thoroughly engrossing biography that confirms Crosby’s essential role in the history of American...
The second volume of a multipart biography of Bing Crosby (1903-1977), concentrating on his remarkable achievements during the war years.
In a long career, the years 1940-1946 represent the most lucrative period for Crosby as a pre-eminent multimedia talent. Having already established fame as a top-selling recording artist, his work on film would reach unprecedented box office success and critical heights. At the same time, he continued as a leading radio star on the popular Kraft Music Hall. Noted jazz critic Giddins (Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, 2013, etc.), a winner of a Peabody and National Book Critics Circle Award, among others, focuses much of the narrative on Crosby’s notable career accomplishments, recounting a tireless work and travel schedule to rival any artist. In addition to chronicling Crosby’s generous efforts on behalf of the enlisted men during the war that included several USO tours, the author provides extensive details on the production of each of Crosby’s films, radio broadcasts, and recording sessions, including his contributions as a businessman and entrepreneur in the further expansion of these industries. The author doesn’t shy away from his subject’s personal limitations and his often remote behavior within his family, exploring his long and often troubled first marriage to former actress and nightclub singer, Dixie Lee. Giddins also examines Crosby’s harsh disciplinary approach to raising his four sons from his marriage to Lee. Later to be recounted in Going My Own Way, son Gary’s memoir, this aspect of the artist’s life would somewhat tarnish his reputation among contemporary audiences. Throughout the book, the author impressively maintains a balanced view of Crosby’s complex character: an affable, hardworking performer admired by his peers and audience but also a man with values and ideas representative of his generation and piously Catholic upbringing. Ultimately, the author establishes Crosby’s relevancy as an indisputable talent worth fair consideration from future generations.
A deeply researched and thoroughly engrossing biography that confirms Crosby’s essential role in the history of American music and film during a crucial period of the 20th century.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-88792-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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