A worthy, if a bit ponderous, contribution to entertainment history.
A neglected titan of popular culture gets his due.
Forbes (Literature/Univ. of California, San Diego) presents the life and career of Bert Williams (1874–1922), a protean figure in American entertainment and the pre-eminent black performer—arguably one of the most popular comedians of any hue—of the early 20th century. She charts with scholarly earnestness Williams’s path from the island of Antigua through his partnership with the similarly talented and driven George Walker to solo success. Williams performed in burnt-cork blackface and in performance embraced such racial stereotypes as “the coon”; his biographer’s treatment of the difficult subject of minstrelsy is trenchant and insightful. Unfortunately, Forbes’s academic prose is dryly analytical and somewhat soporific as she doggedly catalogues Williams’s successes, defeats and social milieu. Still, this electrifying performer remains an underaddressed subject, and Forbes’s diligence yields much of value. A wealth of detail illuminates the evolution of show business during Williams’s era, and the artist himself is quoted at length, revealing an articulate and thoughtful man beneath the burnt cork. Forbes also covers Williams’s contribution to popular music. He was the bestselling black recording artist before 1920, and his massive hit “Nobody” demonstrated a keen understanding of the mechanics and evanescent effects of song. When Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies, it cemented his status as a superstar whose appeal transcended race. He became one of Columbia Records’s consistent top sellers, free at last from the degrading “coon” tropes that had defined his early career. Among his colleagues in those heady days were Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and W.C. Fields, who called Williams “the funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest man I ever knew.”
A worthy, if a bit ponderous, contribution to entertainment history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-02479-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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