There’s no magic, black or otherwise, in this cut-and-paste bio.
Lazy, hackneyed biography of the lounge act to end them all.
Former New York Times contributing reporter Clavin (Sir Walter: Walter Hagen and the Invention of Professional Golf, 2005, etc.) provides a gee-whiz look at singer-trumpeter Louis Prima’s Las Vegas heyday with spouse and musical partner Keely Smith. Enthralled by fellow New Orleans native Louis Armstrong, Italian-American Prima began his musical career in the 1920s and became a popular fixture at New York’s during the ’30s. Forced to break up his big band by changing tastes, Prima was down on his heels in 1954 when, out of desperation, he took a gig at the Sahara Hotel’s Casbar Lounge, doing five sets a night from midnight to 6 a.m. Rambunctious Prima, deadpan Smith and their high-voltage band quickly became the toast of Vegas, and they were recording stars pulling down a million-dollar salary by the time divorce broke up their act in 1961. Clavin appears utterly unqualified to parse Prima’s musical style, which combined the sound of the small black R&B combos, who rose during the ’40s as the big-band era waned, with his own Italianate repertoire and extroverted showmanship. The author also provides very few primary sources and offers no explanation of why Smith failed to sit down for an interview. Most of the material is dredged up from past tomes about Vegas’ showbiz and mob history, yellowing press clippings and previous film biographies of Prima. Extreme padding is evident in passages that catalog contemporaneous movie-house attractions and TV broadcasts for no apparent reason. The main narrative is larded further with threadbare recaps of Vegas’ history as a playground for Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and gangsters like Sam Giancana. Clavin’s fondness for cliché, idolatrous tone and unwillingness to supply even a glimmering of intelligent analysis make for torturous reading.
There’s no magic, black or otherwise, in this cut-and-paste bio.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-821-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
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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