A biography of Irving Berlin, together with a social history of American entertainment. The book details Berlin's roots as a Jew born in Russia, and his escape from the ghetto. He became a singing waiter and started to compose but was never able to read music. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly The man Jerome Kern said was American music wrote 1500 songs (a list is included), had an unerring insight into popular taste, graduated with meteoric swiftness from singing for pennies in Manhattan's unsavory Lower East Side saloons to Broadway and Hollywood tycoondom, and lived to be 101. In this biography, widely researched and buttressed with a mass of interviews, Bergreen, author of the acclaimed James Agee , brings us the life of a man who, in addition to being an untrained tunesmith of genius--who pounded out such hits as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "God Bless America," "This Is the Army" and "White Christmas," plus many show tunes, with quick-fire regularity--was reclusive, insecure and, toward the end of his life, paranoid. He died in 1989. Berlin's story, richly and skillfully told here, is not only the story of popular American music, studded with such names as Kern, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Gershwin, Cole Porter and Fred Astaire, but approaches being the story of 20th-century America. Photos. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Irving Berlin has long been recognized as one of this century's greatest popular composers, yet no book until this one has brought to life every level of this complicated man's personality. Bergreen, author of the acclaimed James Agee: A Life ( LJ 6/15/84), begins with an evocative description of the 1893 immigration of Berlin's family from Russia to the lively Jewish neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Berlin went on to write some of the great anthems of his generation. Though Bergreen has tremendous admiration for his subject, he is hard-hitting and explicit about Berlin's failings. Indeed, some readers may be uncomfortable with the author's portrayal of the composer as the tormented show business near-equivalent of Howard Hughes. Yet Bergreen never loses sight of Berlin's basic genius. Recommended for most collections, this compelling book will remain the standard for many years. - Daniel J. Lombardo, Jones Lib., Inc., Amherst, Mass. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.