An appropriately big book for an oversized artistic presence.
The meatiness of the material justifies the length of the author’s second (and concluding) volume of his biography of Frank Sinatra (1915-1998).
Just as his subject matured into a far more compelling artist than the one who had elicited squeals from bobby-soxers, the follow-up to Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice (2010) is far more substantial than that initial volume. Where the biographer subjected the early Sinatra to plenty of psychobabble—lots of mommy issues—and purple prose (particularly steamy with Ava Gardner), the story that begins with his mid-1950s resurgence sustains its own narrative momentum with the author generally staying out of the way. The allure of Gardner remains, long after their short-lived marriage, but Sinatra has grown in accomplishment (and reader interest) as a recording artist, an actor, a Nevada tycoon, a record-label mogul, and a controversial public figure. His pals at the time included future president John F. Kennedy and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana—as well as the notorious Judith Campbell Exner, who was involved with all three—and Kaplan nimbly imagines the negotiations of power and influence, as Kennedy ultimately froze Sinatra out and Giancana threatened his life. The author explores the ambivalence of Sinatra’s relationships with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and his propensity toward both public boorishness and private benevolence, and he illuminates his “astonishingly intimate singing, created in the one place where Frank Sinatra was capable of creating intimacy.” Kaplan still displays pulpy flashes, in his evocation of how Sinatra and Mia Farrow “began to explore the strange new territory of each other” and “were a strange hybrid, this May-September pair, holding hands over a chasm, trying to stay together in spite of everything.” Refusing to take sides between Sinatra’s widow and his progeny, Kaplan treats the final years of Sinatra’s life in comparatively perfunctory fashion. But most of the rest provides a riveting story, strong enough to stand on its own without a lot of authorial embellishment.
An appropriately big book for an oversized artistic presence.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53539-7
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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