Synopses & Reviews
Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures. His musical innovation and exuberance made him a household name, yet the full story of his extravagant life has never been told. Now, drawing on a vast, previously unexplored archive of Armstrong's writings and recordings, acclaimed biographer Laurence Bergreen presents an intimate, provocative, and definitive portrait of the legendary Pied Piper of American music.
The musical talents of Satchmo--as Armstrong became universally known--were prodigious and groundbreaking. After learning to blow his horn in the bordellos and honky-tonks of Storyville, New Orleans's bustling red-light district, he honed his sound on a Mississippi riverboat and later became a featured solo trumpeter in the nightclub bands of Chicago and New York, where his stunning musicianship, gravelly voice, and irrepressible personality captivated audiences and critics alike. Countless recordings, nonstop touring of America and Europe, a radio show--the first ever hosted by a black man--and film appearances catapulted him to international stardom, yet he always remained true to himself and loyal to his roots. Despite his successes, Armstrong's career was also marked by intense struggle--against the Depression, against the Chicago gangsters of the 1930s, and, above all, against racial prejudice.
A revolutionary musician and entertainer, Louis Armstrong was also a character of epic proportions. Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age, joyfully, among the prostitutes, pimps, and rag-and-bone merchants of New Orleans. He married four times and enjoyed countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages. Throughout his rich and varied life, he was a believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels; a prolific diarist and correspondent; a devoted friend to celebrities from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald; a perceptive social observer; and, in his later years, an international goodwill ambassador. Even as segments of the black community scorned him as a sellout to the white establishment, Armstrong broke color barriers wherever he went and helped other blacks to find equality and identity in modern America. "You see that horn?" he would ask his adversaries. "That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language."
Filled with insights and information gleaned from Armstrong's voluminous reminiscences and featuring a superb collection of photographs, this remarkable book brings to life as never before the charismatic figure who forever changed the face of music. In vivid detail and with warmth, wit, and breathtaking sweep, Laurence Bergreen's Louis Armstrong reveals a man of passion, courage, humor, and genius.
Review
andquot;Laurence Bergreen's Columbus was brillliant, audacious, volatile, paranoid and ruthless. What emerges in this biography,and#160; a worthy addition toand#160; the literature on Columbus is a surprising and revealing portrait of a man who might have been the title charcater in a Shakespearan tradegy.andquot;
Review
andquot;Laurence Bergreen's ambitious new biography,
Columbus: The Four Voyages [is] a spellbinding epic that's simultaneiously a profoundly private portrait of the most complex, compelling, controversial creature ever to board aand#160; boat. This scrupulously researched, unbiased account of four death-defying journeys to The New World reveals the Admiral's paradoxical personality.andquot;
Review
andquot;A compelling new book [that] details the explorer's trips to the New World, including three you haven't heard about.andquot;
Review
andquot;Once you have read this superb acount of Columbus' four voyages, you will never be content with the cliche about the Italian-born explorer's sailing the ocean blue in 1492. Author of many prize-winning popular history books on topics as diverse as Marco Polo and Al Capone. Laurence Bergreen is a New York-based scholar whose portrayal of the life and times of Christopher Columbus is a tour de force.andquot;
Review
andquot;Laurence Bergreen's new book, refreshingly, is fluid in style in its style and comprehensive in its research. Richly illustrated and enhanced with maps that are as legible as they are relevant.
Columbus: The Four Voyages is complex in its themes, intriguing in its substance and sparkling with suprises.andquot;
Review
andquot;In this scrupulously fair and often thrilling account of his four vorages to the andquot;New World,andquot; Bergreen reveals Columbus as brilliant, brave, adventurous, and deeply flawed . . . A superb reexamination of the character and career of a still controversial historical agent.andquot;
Synopsis
From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer
Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costsandmdash;political, moral, and economic.
In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. Written from the participants' vivid perspectives, this breathtakingly dramatic account will be embraced by readers of Bergreen's previous biographies of Marco Polo and Magellan and by fans of Nathaniel Philbrick, Simon Winchester, and Tony Horwitz.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 519-522) and index. Discography: p. 499-518.
About the Author
Laurence Bergreen is the author of several award-winning biographies, including those of Louis Armstrong, Al Capone, Irving Berlin, and James Agee. He has written for many national publications including Esquire and Newsweek, taught at the New School for Social Research, and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. Bergreen has also served as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards and as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award. Bergreen lives in New York City.