If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.
The last testament of an African American showbiz insider is here rendered as an impassioned, richly detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking evocation of Black culture in 20th century Detroit and beyond.
Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson (1913-1968) was a real-life nightclub impresario, dance studio instructor, and entertainment columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper based in Detroit. As this book begins, Ziggy is near death and also near completion of what he characterizes as a “book of saints,” a collection of profiles and reminiscences of more than 50 personalities, famous, obscure, and in-between, who “whispered encouragement and clapped…forward” him and generations of those soul-nourished and otherwise entertained in the book’s legendary “Black Bottom” neighborhood during the ascendant and boom years of the city’s auto industry. At its outset, this hybrid of portrait gallery, cultural history, and dramatized biography seems to resemble a grand literary equivalent of a “Youth Colossal,” one of Ziggy’s annual Father’s Day nightclub recitals that one of his saints, the poet Robert Hayden, likens to “a W.E.B. DuBois pageant.” But as the portraits accumulate and grow in depth and breadth, they make up an absorbing and poignant account of a glittering age in the life of a once-thriving metropolis. The portraits are punctuated by celebratory “libations,” some of which have so much hard liquor and sugar cubes as to make one fear diabetic shock. Included among Ziggy’s saints: heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; funeral parlor tycoon and political leader Charles Diggs Sr.; NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, who had “come up all kinds of hard, but [whose] ambition was green and vibrant”; UAW negotiator Marc Stepp; actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom Ziggy describes as “the lady who knows no color”); theater director Lloyd George Richards; dancer Lucille Ellis; Sammy Davis Jr., who pops up throughout the narrative, characterized by Ziggy at one point as a “little genius”; Maxine Powell, who taught Motown Records’ stable of emerging stars how to comport themselves on- and offstage; and, at the tail end, Ziggy himself, whose narrative voice is seasoned with such idiosyncrasies as referring to Black folks in general as “sepians” and characterizing Black factory workers who made up his readers and audiences as “breadwinners.” This last tribute is likely the work of the unofficial collaborator whose own story and embellishments enhance this tapestry. She is referred to throughout as “Colored Girl,” but one suspects she is a surrogate for Randall, a Detroit native whose experiences writing country music likely account for the lyricism, pathos, and down-home humor in her narrative.
If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06296862-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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