About this item
A fastmoving, 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 identity. Exploring the interplay of Berlin's life with the life of New York City, noted biographer James Kaplan offers a visceral narrative of Berlin as selfmade man and witty, wily, tough Jewish immigrant. This fastpaced, musically opinionated biography uncovers Berlin's unique brilliance as a composer of music and lyrics. Masterfully written and psychologically penetrating, Kaplan's book underscores Berlin's continued relevance in American popular culture.
About the Author
JAMES KAPLAN has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, as well as noted fiction (Best American Short Stories) , for over three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurley Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His first novel, Pearl's Progress, was published by Knopf in 1989. His nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport, The Airport (1994) -- called "a splendid book" by Gay Talese -- remains a classic of aviation literature and New York storytelling. His second novel, Two Guys From Verona -- published in 1998 by Atlantic Monthly Press, and chosen by The New York Times as one of its Notable Books of the Year -- is being developed as a movie by Jeremy Garelick, screenwriter of The Break-Up and The Hangover. In 2002 Kaplan co-authored the autobiography of John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious, which was an international bestseller (and number one on the New York Times list) . His 2005 book Dean and Me: A Love Story, co-written with Jerry Lewis and published by Doubleday, was a New York Times bestseller as well. In November 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's definitive biography of Frank Sinatra. The book was also a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen by Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani as one of her Top Ten Books of 2010. James Kaplan lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons. You can visit his website at www.jameskaplan.net.
