The Beatles: All These Years, Volume One – Tune In by Mark Lewisohn – review

Early days: George Harrison and John Lennon on stage with Tony Sheridan (far right) in Hamburg, circa 1960. Photograph: Ellen Piel/ K & K/ Redferns

Whether or not the Beatles were bigger than Jesus remains a moot point. But that hasn't stopped seasoned Beatles writer Mark Lewisohn penning what is shaping up to be the bible of all things Fab – a three-volume definitive history.

Lewisohn is an all-knowing figure; the subject's foremost authority, a super-fan with skills beyond hyperventilation. Tune In, the first volume, has all the heft of the Old Testament, with greater forensic rigour. It is a hugely old-fashioned brick of a book, written (and priced) for a baby boomer generation who – like babies, perhaps – quite enjoy being told the same story for the umpteenth time. Beginning well before the beginning, this edition of Tune In runs to 946 pages of social, local and personal histories, interspersed with exhaustive explications of the wider forces and happenstance surrounding the Beatles' genesis. There is a whole page on the British money system, pre-1971; equally, Lewisohn often points up the casual sexism of the age, in which even the doe-eyed nice boy Paul McCartney indulged. His girlfriend Dot Rhone describes how she and Cynthia Powell, girlfriend of John Lennon, were forbidden to talk about music in company. Poor Elvis got called up, but the Beatles escaped national service by a whisker, a fact that is well-known, but whose significance is huge.

The sins of all their forefathers are covered in detail going back a couple of generations. We probably all knew the acerbic John Lennon could be a bastard, as cruel as he was witty, but Lewisohn uncovers interesting levels of illegitimacy in many of these often part-Irish Catholic families. In fact, they're not even called the Beatles until 300 pages in; Ringo doesn't actually join until around page 700. This is the story of the Beatles as schoolboys, of Lennon and McCartney "sagging off" to write in secret at Aunt Mimi's, of the latest rock'n'roll and R&B cuts, and of lost virginities, of Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best and Hamburg, of the "Piedels" – the German mispronunciation of Beatles, the Penises – on "prellies" (Preludin, the upper guzzled by many in the cellar clubs), ripping it up on the Reeperbahn. Sometimes, these famous men really seem like motherless children – both McCartney and Lennon lose their mothers in their teens and this huge, shared loss is given sensitive and apposite emphasis. Deaths, desertions and departures are key to the story.

Lewisohn's analysis of early rock'n'roll here lacks, perhaps, the hipster swing of a Greil Marcus. This is a textbook; but that is no barrier to enjoyment. There are academic-style endnotes, in which virtually every statement is substantiated by a primary or secondary source, and footnotes on minutiae – such as how many different ways Mersey Beat, the local scene's paper, misspelled "McCartney" in 1961. The detail extends to Jim McCartney asking his son Paul whether his bowels have moved on the day he sets off for Hamburg.

It is, in short, a work of scholarship that borders on the obsessive; a work made slightly easier, you imagine, by Lewisohn's previous Beatles publication, The Beatles: 25 Years in the Life (1987), in which the author practically stalked the Fabs in real time, figuring out exactly where they all were, and what they were doing, on any given day. There is the temptation, too, to imagine that All These Years is the Gospel according to Paul, even though a song on McCartney's latest album, Early Days, rolls its eyes at pop historiographers. "Now everybody seems to have their own opinion/ Of who did this and who did that," he warbles, "but as for me I don't see how they can remember/ When they weren't where it was at."

Although Lewisohn maintains that his is not an authorised biography, he has been working from within the tent, so to speak, for years. He has been employed by EMI and Apple Corps and written liner notes for McCartney albums. That said, there are no new interviews with either McCartney or Ringo Starr; Tune In relies on every other imaginable source, not least Neil Aspinall, the band's roadie-turned-manager. And McCartney's own frailties do not go unexamined. For all their musical heroics, every Beatle ends up having plenty of clay on his feet.

In the publicity materials for Tune In, Lewisohn asks us to "scrub what we know, and start again", implying that his is a fresh take on the Beatles, illuminated by deep research, over-turning received opinions, digging out unexamined truths. Ultimately, that is not quite what he achieves. The people and milieux that spring from these pages remain, largely, as we previously knew them: the core of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, sharing in-jokes and a taste for hard-to-find vinyl and black leather; George Martin, a fellow comedy aficionado with the studio skills to bottle their magic and the courage to give this unruly, untried band their heads. It is the breadth and scope of Lewisohn's endeavour that are unparalleled, the knowledge that the young Lennon and McCartney take two buses to some guy's house who is rumoured to know a B7 chord. According to an interview with Danny Baker, Lewisohn anticipates the next tome will be along in five or six years – just enough time, at a push, to digest this momentous first volume.

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THE VILLAGE: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, A History of Greenwich Village

May 1, 2013

John Strausbaugh
Ecco
ISBN 978-0062078193
624 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday.

Where's the map? While there's much to praise and enjoy in John Strausbaugh's social and cultural history of Greenwich Village, there really should have been a map. People who have visited New York as tourists are likely to know that "the Village" comprises the streets and neighborhoods around Washington Square. You do know where Washington Square is, right? Near New York University? This book needs a map.

I emphasize this mainly because Strausbaugh deals with very specific places - bars, restaurants, theaters, clubs, apartment buildings - and he repeatedly identifies their exact locations. Can you visualize the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia streets? Can you pinpoint Patchin Place, once the home of writers E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes? (It's a little mews off 10th Avenue, near Sixth.) How far is it from the Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock and Frank O'Hara hung out, to the White Horse Tavern, where Delmore Schwartz and William Gaddis did their drinking, to the Lion's Head, the longtime watering hole of Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt and Pete Hamill?

Such questions of proximity matter because Strausbaugh emphasizes the intensity of Village life. While it's hardly a gated community, Greenwich Village does possess a kind of "under the dome" quality, with musicians, writers, artists and rebels of every kind living next door to each other and out of each other's pockets. You can walk from 14th Street to Houston Street - the rough northern and southern boundaries of the Village - in just over half an hour.

People have always gravitated to this tight warren of streets because of its implicit philosophy of total freedom. Strausbaugh calls it "a magnet for misfits." Here, if anywhere, you could realize your true self, you could be as wild, creative, promiscuous or weird as you wanted to be, and you would actually fit right in. If you were, say, a kid growing up in Ohio and you yearned for a literary life, you naturally daydreamed about having a drink with W.H. Auden at a bar near St. Mark's, dropping by Eli and Ted Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop, listening to Bob Dylan at the Cafe Wha?, having your novel published by Grove Press, and shedding a tear when the book ended up on the remainder tables at the Strand. In every way, "The Village" sounded like heaven.

Yet for every masterpiece created, for every career launched, there were scores of broken lives. "The history of Greenwich Village," writes Strausbaugh in his introduction, "is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide, or partied themselves into oblivion." In truth, until rents grew outrageous, the Village was largely the haven of penniless dreamers, for those just starting their careers or those who were convinced that - despite the failures, the drugs or the drink - they could somehow still make it. The lucky and talented ones nearly always ended up moving uptown to an apartment on Central Park West or out to a house in Connecticut's Fairfield County.

In its structure, Strausbaugh's history may be likened to a portrait gallery. Starting in colonial times and working up to the present, he organizes his chapters around brief biographies of seemingly hundreds of "beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues." If nothing else, the book represents an enormous amount of research and provides hours of entertaining reading.

Back in the 1850s, artsy Villagers frequented Pfaff's, a restaurant-saloon "in the cellar of the Coleman House" (which still stands on Broadway). There you might find all the vagabonds and loafers of the city, including Walt Whitman, the brilliant writer Fitz-James O'Brien (now best remembered for his fantasy stories, such as "What Was it?" and "The Diamond Lens") and the free-spirited poet Ada Clare, who defied convention by trumpeting the fact she was a single mother by having her calling card inscribed "Miss Ada Clare and Son."

Throughout his book Strausbaugh emphasizes the sexual freedom found in the Village and almost nowhere else. In the 1890s the Slide, "possibly the first drag bar in the city ... was at 157 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson streets, the site of the music club Kenny's Castaways." (See why you need a map?) Nearby on West Third was an equally scandalous basement called - wonderful name - "the Golden Rule Pleasure Club."

In the years just before World War I, the Village enjoyed its first great flowering. At the salon of Mabel Dodge one might encounter a cross-section of its inhabitants, including - in Dodge's own words - "Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, 'Old Friends,' Psychoanalysts, IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World], Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman's-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men."

Radical politics and cutting-edge art have always flourished in the Village, and Strausbaugh duly discusses revolutionaries Emma Goldman and John Reed (author of "Ten Days That Shook the World"), John Sloan and the Ashcan school of painters, the proletarian magazine the Masses, the innovative theatrical triumphs of Eugene O'Neill, the career of red-headed poet and heartbreaker Edna St. Vincent Millay, the satirical novelist Dawn Powell, the scandalously bisexual chanteuse Libby Holman, photographer of the grotesque Diane Arbus, such beat legends as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and, not least, guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix.

Besides chronicling cultural activities, Strausbaugh interweaves accounts of local politics, from the era of Tammany Hall through the administrations of mayors Jimmy Walker, Fiorello La Guardia and Ed Koch (all with Village connections). I didn't know that before he entered politics Walker wrote songs, including "Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?" But, then, such serendipitous discovery is part of this book's charm and usefulness. Who would have thought that for many years one of the Mafia's most powerful bosses, Vincent Gigante, deliberately pretended to be a shambling half-wit to throw the Feds off his trail?

Still, for all the craziness of Village life throughout its history, one is still awed by the amount of sheer talent that sometimes congregated in this one small neighborhood. When Harry Belafonte, before he decided to become a singer, signed up for an acting class with Erwin Piscator at the New School, his was "the only dark face" in the class. "He introduced himself to the other nobodies: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Bea Arthur, and Bernie Schwartz, aka Tony Curtis."

The last chapters of Strausbaugh's book focus, to a large extent, on the post-1960s gay Village, including discussion of the notorious clubs the Toilet and the Anvil, the epoch-making riot outside the Stonewall bar (two doors down from the Lion's Head), and the AIDS epidemic. He ends, as he must, in the present when the old Village is fast disappearing, growing increasingly gentrified and upscale. And yet. To stroll along Sullivan or MacDougal streets or parts of Sixth Avenue is to feel strangely energized even in 2013, as if Greenwich Village were still and would always be the land of dreams.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE ARROGANT YEARS: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn

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Oct 7, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Lucette Lagnado
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061803673
402 pages
$25.99

Reviewed by Ilene Prusher

In his classic book "On Becoming a Novelist," John Gardner says that anyone who hopes to write a novel would do well to be burdened by angst about his origins: "Belligerent defensive guilt about one's race or country of upbringing ... these are promising signs."

The same could be said for the aspiring memoirist. And that's exactly the vein that Lucette Lagnado has tapped into with her second family memoir, following the success of "The Man in the Sharkskin Suit," which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008. In that book, the writer focused on the life of her father, who cut a dashing, aristocratic figure in Cairo in an era when Jews were part of the upper echelons of Egyptian society.

"The Arrogant Years" focuses on the equally compelling life of the writer's mother and their close yet strained relationship.

While this new memoir also brings readers into the fascinating world of old Cairo before and after the overthrow of its monarchy in 1952, Lagnado is at her best when she plumbs her own psyche to sort out her life's ups and downs. It is a life that begins in Egypt but meets its most formative moments when she is an adolescent and a young woman in America struggling to carve out an identity in a nation whose values differ greatly from those she learned in the Middle East. She borrowed her title from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who describes a character in "Tender is the Night" as having "lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl -- now she felt like making up for them." Lagnado examines a youthful arrogance that was lost to illness and later regained -- but only in part.

She starts by taking us on a journey to the Cairo of her mother's youth, where Jews, Muslims and Christians coexisted and French-speaking cosmopolites saw themselves not just as Egyptian but as of the Levant -- that lovely geographical and cultural concept that has all but faded away. Her mother, Edith, a beautiful teenager who was a budding intellectual and bibliophile, caught the eye of the pasha's wife -- the lady-in-waiting to the queen -- and was given the key to the pasha's voluminous library and tasked with acquiring new books. But the career of the young woman who had read all of Proust by the age of 15 came screeching to an end when, barely 20, she married a man in a sharkskin suit: Leon Lagnado, more than two decades her senior. Respectable women were not expected to work once married, and Edith conformed to that custom.

Although I am a lover of all things Levantine and have visited Cairo enough times to recognize the neighborhoods, hotels and eateries that Lagnado describes, I found myself most captivated and moved by her writing about her new life in America. While the book is a worthy exploration of the immigrant experience, Lagnado succeeds most when she explores issues that have little do with her newcomer's status. Primary among these are her reaction to being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in high school and her feelings of being devastatingly lost during her freshman year at Vassar.

She writes poignantly about a childhood girlfriend who was not permitted to see her because the girl's family believed Lagnado's disease was contagious. This taught Lagnado not to tell any of her new friends at college about her bout with cancer. "I felt as if I were indeed contagious -- in quarantine -- surrounded by an invisible wall that kept me apart from them."

Lagnado's mother was convinced that a curse -- the evil eye -- had been placed on the family and that all misfortune, including Lagnado's illness, could be attributed to it. Even some of her siblings believed that "it was as if a curse -- a curse of biblical proportions -- had been placed on our household." In this way, "The Arrogant Years" is sometimes reminiscent of Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," in which whole families are cursed with a tough-luck "fuku" they just can't shake.

Some parts of Lagnado's memoir are frustrating. In recalling her early rebellions against the separation of men and women in her Brooklyn immigrant synagogue, she describes a mikve as a place "to be purified of the sin of being female." (The mikve is used for a variety of purity rituals and serves as a place where traditional Jewish women immerse themselves after menstruation, but the waters are not meant to be a sin washing-machine.)

Sometimes Lagnado introduces topics in a convoluted way. For example, we learn that she has become a muckraking journalist, seemingly a key part of the narrative, only when she writes toward the end of the book that her stroke-stricken mother picked up her reporter's notebooks. But if you can follow the narration, even when it winds like the Cairo alleyways, Lagnado's is ultimately a rewarding journey.

Ilene Prusher is a former Middle East bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor and is deputy editor of the Jerusalem Report. Her first novel, "The Fixer of Baghdad," will be published in Britain next year.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Wed, Jun 15: Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928

by Timothy S. Susanin A review by Charles Solomon

When the extraordinary success of Steamboat Willie made Walt Disney an overnight sensation in 1928, he'd already spent nearly a decade working in animation. During those years, he'd had successes and failures, as Timothy S. Susanin recounts in great detail in his new book Walt Before Mickey.

In 1919, while Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks were working as commercial artists in Kansas City, they taught themselves animation. Disney began exploring the medium with the "Newman Laugh-O-Grams," a series of one-minute topical cartoons for local theater owner Frank Newman. He quit his job and started a studio with money borrowed from friends and relatives. Although the studio went broke, Disney completed the live action/animation Alice's Wonderland, then joined his brother Roy in Los Angeles.

Distributor Margaret Winkler offered Disney a contract for a series based on Alice that would continue the premise of a live-action little girl in a cartoon setting. The series proved successful, but Winkler's business was taken over by her more aggressive husband, Charles Mintz. In 1927, he asked Disney to develop a new character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney's real talents as an organizer and story man began to emerge during the making of the "Oswald" series, which garnered good reviews.

But Disney wanted to improve his films. In early 1928, he went to New York City to ask Mintz to raise the price per film; Mintz instead insisted that he take a cut -- or else Disney would lose the character and his studio. Mintz had covertly signed up almost the entire staff so that the studio could go on without Disney. This underhanded deal changed the course of animation history and American popular culture, as it led Disney to create Mickey Mouse.

Susanin is an attorney, and his remarkable thoroughness makes readers wish he were handling a case for them. Unfortunately, he becomes so enamored with details that the result is like reading about Walt through a tea strainer. Does it increase anyone's understanding of Disney's genius to know that in 1922, he rented office space for his fledgling studio from "realtors working for Lawrence Baer, thirty-seven, a Kansas City native and the son of a German immigrant" -- to whom Susanin devotes four lengthy paragraphs?

Walt Disney's life has already been thoroughly documented: More has reportedly been written about him than any other filmmaker except Charlie Chaplin. His work before the creation of Mickey is covered in the more readable, lavishly illustrated Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney by Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman, in addition to five reliable biographies (by Diane Miller and Pete Martin, Bob Thomas, Katherine and Richard Greene, Michael Barrier and Neal Gabler). Minor and often tangential details constitute the only new material in Walt Before Mickey.

Susanin's knowledge of animation history is limited, and this hampers the narrative. He correctly observes that Julius, the black cat in the "Alice" comedies, initially "seemed like a generic response to the popularity of the popular Felix the Cat," but fails to discuss how Felix influenced not only Julius, but Oswald (and Mickey). He notes that Friz Freleng, another Kansas City native who worked briefly for Disney, "eventually became a director at Warner Brothers, and spent over thirty years there," but omits the five Oscars he won.

Walt Before Mickey is a useful resource for serious film scholars, though general readers may find it much too arcane for their interests.

Solomon is the author, most recently, of The Art of 'Toy Story 3' and Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of 'Beauty and the Beast.'

This review was originally published by the Los Angeles Times.

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WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 10, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Ricky Riccardi
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307378446
369 pages
$28.95

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The "later years" of Louis Armstrong lasted almost a quarter century, from the first performance of his new small group at Town Hall in New York on May 17, 1947, until his death in his modest house in Queens on July 6, 1971. In the life of this extraordinary man, it is a period that has long been marked by controversy. As Ricky Riccardi writes, "The myth of the 'two Armstrongs' continues: the young serious artist and the old entertainer." The myth was spread largely by a handful of critics, principally the musically astute but humor-challenged Gunther Schuller, who argued that Armstrong peaked in the1920s with his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens and subsequently was little more than what Schuller called "a good-natured buffoon, singing 'Blueberry Hill' and 'What a Wonderful World' night after night."

By now the myth has been quite thoroughly punctured, first by Gary Giddins in his slender but authoritative "Satchmo" (1988) and then by Terry Teachout in his definitive biography, "Pops" (2009). Both writers understand that Armstrong was a natural entertainer whose clownish onstage antics were expressions of his ebullient personality, and both insist that the level of his musicianship during this period was far higher than his detractors are willing to concede. Now comes Riccardi, a younger student of Armstrong's career, to make the case once more:

"In many ways, these were the most important years of Armstrong's life. With a bruised lip and an almost inhuman, punishing schedule, Armstrong worked harder than ever before to attain new heights of popularity, staying relevant and in demand at an age when most performers start to fade. With each passing year, the popularity of jazz in America diminished while, simultaneously, the popularity of Louis Armstrong around the world only grew. Because many jazz critics can't embrace popular acts -- and because 'new' is so often equated with 'better' -- a lot of Armstrong's most lasting works of those years were repudiated."

The "new" that supposedly was "better" included bebop and the other forms of "modern" jazz that subsequently evolved from it. The decade and a half after World War II was a pivotal moment in jazz history. On the one hand, almost all the great founders of jazz and swing were very much alive and performing -- Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday et al. -- while on the other hand, the next generation was aggressively asserting itself: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker (until his death in 1955), Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis et al. To all intents and purposes the big-band era was dead, and with it jazz's standing as a genuinely popular musical form. The younger generation was less interested in pleasing audiences than in pleasing itself, and its hostility toward its more outgoing elders was palpable.

Many older musicians felt this antagonism, but none more persistently or strongly than Armstrong. Not only did he clown unashamedly in the course of his act -- and having seen that act many times during these years, I can testify that he was often flat-out hilarious -- but there was a widespread feeling among African-Americans, especially among musicians, that at times he descended into offensive black stereotypes. Because of this, and because by the 1950s his audiences were predominantly white, he was regarded in some quarters as "good ol' Uncle Tom Satchmo, the smiling, grinning Negro." Never mind that he repeatedly refuted this both in words (most famously, his attack on President Eisenhower during the Little Rock school crisis of 1957 as "two-faced" and having "no guts") and in deeds (his refusal to perform in his beloved hometown of New Orleans until it would receive him "without racial distinction"). The calumny had remarkable staying power, and he never fully got out from under it.

Part of the problem was that Armstrong's sense of humor was so irrepressible that it colored almost everything he said and did. Once in the late 1960s while he was performing at Basin Street East in Manhattan, the great pianist Erroll Garner greeted him with, "Hey, Pops, how's everything?" to which Armstrong replied without missing a beat, "White folks still in the lead." Though Armstrong could indeed be serious, and when alone could slip into reflective moods that struck some who glimpsed them as almost mournful, in his heart he really did believe that, well, it's a wonderful world. Joe Muranyi, who played clarinet with his All-Stars in the late 1960s, told Riccardi: "He was the greatest star I've encountered because he really was a star but he didn't act like one. He was very real. There wasn't a phony bone in his body. And he liked people. And he liked poor people. And he liked crippled people and fat ladies. He loved the humanity aspect. And he was just wonderful, I can't tell you."

The All-Stars with whom Muranyi played were the last in the line tracing back to the May night in 1947 when Armstrong took the stage at Town Hall with Jack Teagarden on trombone, Bobby Hackett on trumpet, Sid Catlett and George Wettling on drums, Dick Cary on piano and Bobby Haggart on bass. That performance, available on CD as "The Complete Town Hall Concert 1947," left no doubt that Armstrong hadn't lost a thing musically since the legendary glory days of his youth, and led to the formation of the first touring All-Stars later that year: Armstrong, Teagarden, Catlett, Cary along with Barney Bigard on clarinet, Arvell Shaw on bass and Velma Middleton on vocals. In November this group went to Boston for a concert that has been preserved for the ages on "Satchmo at Symphony Hall," one of the absolutely indispensable jazz recordings.

The original All-Stars didn't stay together long. The greatest loss was Teagarden, who stayed on until 1951, leaving a disconsolate Armstrong to complain: "What really bothers me, Pops, is losing Jack. That Teagarden, man, he's like my brother." Riccardi stoutly defends the later All-Stars -- he says "their golden era" began in late 1951 -- and indeed during the last two decades of its existence the group made at least one classic recording, "Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy," and two smash-hit singles: "Mack the Knife" and "Hello, Dolly." (The ubiquitous "What a Wonderful World" was recorded with a studio orchestra and choir.) To my taste, though, Armstrong's postwar years reached their musical apogee with those first All-Stars.

During those years Armstrong was on the road all the time, doing one-night stands across the country and around the world. Toward the end, his health suffered, and he had to pull back, though he hated to do so. His need to entertain was as powerful as his need to make music, and it kept him going past the point of exhaustion. It is amazing, all things considered, that he lived as long as he did, dying four weeks before his 70th birthday.

Riccardi writes about Armstrong with self-evident and infectious love. "What a Wonderful World" could have profited from some judicious pruning -- fewer accounts of recording sessions and road itineraries -- but it is written in a generous spirit and indeed enhances our understanding of just how good Armstrong really was in the postwar years.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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