As diverse and diverting as a night at the Follies.
A rich and entertaining biography of Broadway’s first auteur.
Ever the witty and erudite raconteur, Mordden (All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919–1959, 2007, etc.) transports readers to the time when Times Square was just an intersection of streets. Shortly after Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. arrived in the 1890s, the new subway system made 42nd Street and Broadway a hub, bringing riders to what was becoming Theaterland. Ziegfeld hit the right place at the right time, but as Mordden wisely points out, the man knew exactly what to do as the stars were aligning. Ziegfeld had already honed his taste and producing skills in Chicago; he knew what he liked and what the public wanted. Besides making deals and (sometimes) writing checks, he put his stamp on what he staged. Ziegfeld spotlighted charismatic stars, signing Anna Held, Marilyn Miller, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, etc., and put them to work in lavishly designed revues, eventually known as the Ziegfeld Follies. For material and style, Ziegfeld drew on classic and popular entertainment forms—Goethe and sex, Mordden says—creating a Broadway template that prevails today, as anyone who sees the current New York revivals of the brassy Gypsy and the lyrical South Pacific will observe. Near the end of the ’20s, Ziegfeld set collaborators to work on an emerging form, the musical that wed songs to a strong, central narrative. The result was Show Boat, a cornerstone in American musical theater. Mordden gives ample attention to Ziegfeld’s personal life—in particular, his marriage to actress Billie Burke and his liaisons with the “American girls” he glorified on stage—but the main focus is the theater. The author’s descriptions are enlivening, his profiles sharp, his tone casual and elegant. He may never have met a diversion he didn’t like (the original route of the IRT; notes on kooch dancing) or a zinger he couldn’t resist (a description of Anna Held’s pelt-laden photo-op attire looked “like the interior of an Indian hunting lodge”).
As diverse and diverting as a night at the Follies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37543-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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