All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett Hardcover - 2011 - 1st Edition

From the jacket flap

In "All the Things You Are," award-winning author David Evanier offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of one of the most beloved singers of all time. Among America's greatest entertainers, from Garland to Sinatra, Tony Bennett alone is still here and at the top of his game. He has led an amazing life. At age ten, he stood beside Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at the dedication of New York City's Triboro Bridge and, leading the throng of people across it, sang "Marching Along Together." He fought in World War II and helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp. He was discovered by Pearl Bailey and Bob Hope. In the 1960s, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and several of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And, of course, he sings, too.

Evanier probes deeply into the life and career of a genuine living legend. Drawing upon interviews with scores of Tony's friends, family members, and fellow musicians, as well as experts on the last fifty years of music, he vividly captures the musical history of an era. He brings deep insight into a man who has stayed perennially young because of his devotion to his art and to humanity. Friends speak affectionately of how Tony would rebuke them when they said that Tony was a better singer than his idol, Frank Sinatra. One friend tells how the singer's brief unannounced appearances at small music clubs lifted the hearts of mourning New Yorkers after 9/11. Another describes Tony's repeated visits to listen to and sing with his former music teacher during the last year of the teacher's life.

Evanier recounts Tony's impoverished yet happy childhood in Depression-era Astoria, Queens, and re-creates the heady early years of his career, as he produced one great hit record after another. He examines Tony's bleakest years, during the 1970s, when the singer struggled with addiction, a difficult second marriage, and evaporating interest in the Great American Songbook he loved to sing. Evanier also reveals the pivotal role Tony's children played in helping him relaunch his career by becoming popular music's ambassador to new generations of listeners. Today he is a musical statesman, America's troubadour, style model, mentor, and the unmatched interpreter of the greatest American composers of popular music, from Gershwin to Berlin to Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.

"All the Things You Are" is a story that includes some of the foremost personalities of the past sixty years: Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Duke Ellington, Bob Hope, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Jimmy Durante, Billie Holiday, Stevie Wonder, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, and many more.

Complete with candid assessments of Tony Bennett's life and career by the likes of legendary radio personality Jonathan Schwartz and the "Wall Street Journal"'s Terry Teachout, "All the Things You Are" is a masterful, groundbreaking biography and must reading for anyone who has heard that voice and fallen in love with the artist behind it.

Media reviews

Citations

• Publishers Weekly, 05/09/2011, Page 0