Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John Szwed PDF

By John Szwed

Kirkus top Books of 2015 choice for Biography •

Published in party of Holiday’s centenary, the 1st biography to target the singer’s outstanding musical talent

When Billie vacation stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the start of what's arguably the main notable and influential occupation in twentieth-century well known song. Her voice weathered numerous shifts in public flavor, and new reincarnations of her proceed to reach, so much lately within the kind of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Most of the writing on vacation has interested in the tragic info of her life—her prostitution on the age of fourteen, her heroin dependancy and alcoholism, her sequence of abusive relationships—or attempted to right the various fabrications of her autobiography. yet now, Billie vacation remains just about the tune, to her functionality sort, and to the self she created and placed into print, on list and on stage.

Drawing on an enormous quantity of recent fabric that has surfaced within the final decade, significantly acclaimed jazz author John Szwed considers how her lifestyles inflected her paintings, her affects, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a few her signature songs, and her legacy.

Show description

Read or Download Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth PDF

Best biography books

Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton PDF

From nationwide booklet Award winner Ron Chernow, a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, encouraged, scandalized, and formed the child nation.

In the 1st full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in many years, nationwide publication Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting tale of a guy who overcame all odds to form, encourage, and scandalize the child the US. in line with historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is "a strong full-length portrait, for my part the easiest ever written, of the main incredible, charismatic and hazardous founding father of all of them. "

Few figures in American historical past were extra hotly debated or extra grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow's biography supplies Hamilton his due and units the checklist instantly, deftly illustrating that the political and financial greatness of today's the US is the results of Hamilton's numerous sacrifices to champion principles that have been usually wildly disputed in the course of his time. "To repudiate his legacy," Chernow writes, "is, in lots of methods, to repudiate the fashionable international. " Chernow the following recounts Hamilton's turbulent lifestyles: an illegitimate, mostly self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he got here out of nowhere to take the US by means of typhoon, emerging to develop into George Washington's aide-de-camp within the Continental military, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the financial institution of latest York, best the Federalist occasion, and changing into the 1st Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Historians have lengthy advised the tale of America's delivery because the triumph of Jefferson's democratic beliefs over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow offers a wholly diversified guy, whose mythical goals have been inspired now not basically by means of self-interest yet through passionate patriotism and a obdurate will to construct the rules of yank prosperity and tool. His is a Hamilton way more human than we've encountered before—from his disgrace approximately his beginning to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with formative years acquaintances to his sizeable feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his hugely public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his unswerving spouse Eliza. and not earlier than has there been a extra bright account of Hamilton's well-known and mysterious loss of life in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

Chernow's biography isn't just a portrait of Hamilton, however the tale of America's start noticeable via its so much significant determine. At a severe time to seem again to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the aim of our associations and our historical past as americans.

James Sullivan's Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin PDF

Journalist and cultural critic James Sullivan tells the tale of other the US from the Nineteen Fifties to the current during this definitive biography of the Catholic boy for whom not anything used to be sacred: George Carlin. Seven soiled phrases is a hilarious and insightful learn, documenting the existence and paintings of the mythical comedian, provocateur, and social critic who fearlessly wondered the yank lifestyle during the phrases we use.

Download e-book for iPad: Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard by Ralf Hoffrogge

Richard Müller, a number one determine of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown this present day. because the operator and unionist who represented Berlin’s metalworkers, he was once the most organiser of the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’, a clandestine community that organised a sequence of mass moves among 1916 and 1918.

New PDF release: John Ruskin (Critical Lives)

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was once the main well-known artwork and structure critic of his time. but his attractiveness has been overshadowed by means of his own lifestyles, specifically his failed marriage to Effie grey, which has forged him within the historical past books as little greater than a Victorian prude. during this e-book, Andrew Ballantyne rescues Ruskin from the dustbin of history’s trifles to bare a deeply attuned philosopher, one whose copious writings had super effect on all sessions of society, from roadmenders to royalty.

Additional resources for Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth

Sample text

For a good exposition of Hobson's theory of underconsumption see J. Allett, New Liberalism, the Political Economy ofj. A. Hobson, University of Toronto Press, 1981, pp. 96-130. e. himself and Mosley, J. Strachey, Revolution By Reason, London, p. 128. Though as Skidelsky put it the Birmingham proposals had been 'fully hatched' by March 1925, Oswald Mosley, London, Macmillan, 1975, p. 138. The full title of Mosley's pamphlet was Revolution by Reason, an account of the Birmingham Proposals together with an analysis of the financial policy of the present government which has led to their great attack upon wages.

49 Given the engrained nature of such quintessentially Fabian attitudes support for a contracyclical use of fiscal policy was inevitably half-hearted. Works such as Revolution by Reason and The Living Wage, therefore, represented a definite challenge to the macroeconomic policy inertia characteristic of Fabianism and the greater part of the economic literature emanating from the Labour Party in the 1920s. Here it is is important to stress that this positive attitude to monetary and fiscal policy on the part of 'liberal socialists', such as Strachey and Hobson, rested upon a fundamental difference in theoretical perspective.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73 74. 75. 29 In his Election Address of October 1924, for example, Strachey advocated the immediate nationalisation of mines, railways, agriculture, banking and the electricity supply, SP, 1924. J. Strachey, Revolution, pp. 135-6, 162. , p. 145. J. A. , p. 46. Ibid. J. Strachey, Revolution, p. 149. , p. 150. , p. 179. , pp. 1,121, 242, my emphasis. , p. 199. J. A. , The Living Wage, pp. 34-5. , p. 37. , p. 39. , p . , p. 34, my emphasis.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.85 of 5 – based on 50 votes

About admin