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"God Bless America", "White Christmas", and "There's No Business Like Show Business" are just some of the more than 1,000 songs written by Irving Berlin. Here is an affectionate, intimate, frank memoir of America's most famous and enduring songwriter of this century by his daughter. Photos.
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From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a fast†‘moving, musically astute portrait of arguably the greatest composer of American popular music Irving Berlin (1888–1989) has been called—by George Gershwin, among others—the greatest songwriter of the golden age of the American popular song. “Berlin has no place in American music,” legendary composer Jerome Kern wrote; “he is American music.” In a career that spanned an astonishing nine decades, Berlin wrote some fifteen hundred tunes, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “God Bless America,” and “White Christmas.” From ragtime to the rock era, Berlin’s work has endured in the very fiber of American national...
Kosinski’s classic, acclaimed as “an impressive novel . . . should confirm [his] position as one of our most significant writers” (Newsweek). A searing novel from a writer of international stature, The Devil Tree is a tale that combines the existential emptiness of Camus’s The Stranger with the universe of international playboys, violence, and murder of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Jonathan Whalen’s life has been determined from the start by the immense fortune of his father, a steel tycoon. Whalen’s childlike delight in power and status mask a greater need, a desire to feel life intensely, through drugs, violence, sex, and attempts at meaningful connection with other people—whether lovers or the memory of his dead parents. But the physical is all that feels real to him, and as he embarks on a journey to Africa with his godparents, Whalen’s embrace of amoral thrill accelerates toward ultimate fulfillment. “Savage . . . [Whalen is] a foolproof, timeless American character.” —Cosmopolitan
The song 'God Bless America' has come to inhabit our collective consciousness. This book tells the fascinating story behind the song, from its composition in 1918 by Irving Berlin, to its first performance by Kate Smith in 1938, to its post 9/11 popularity.
Irving Berlin (1888–1989) was unable to read or write music and could only play the piano in the key of F-sharp major; yet, for the first half of the twentieth century he was America's most successful and most representative songwriter, composing such hits as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "White Christmas," "Anything You Can Do," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "God Bless America." As Thousands Cheer, winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, explores with precision and sensitivity Berlin's long, prolific career; his self-doubt and late-blooming misanthropy; and the tyrannical control he exerted over his legacy of song. From his immigrant beginnings through Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood to his reclusive and bitter final years, this definitive biography reveals the man who wrote 1500 songs but could never quash the fear that, for all his success, he wasn't quite good enough.
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