David Evanier – författare

The first complete biography of singing legend Tony Bennett

Among America''s greatest entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ray Charles, and Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett alone is still here and at the top of his game. For the first time, All the Things You Are tells the incredible story of Bennett''s life and sixty-year career, from his impoverished New York City childhood through his first chart-topping hits, from liberating a concentration camp to his civil rights struggles, from his devastating personal and career battles and addiction in the 1970''s to his stunning comeback and emergence as a musical statesman, America''s troubadour, role model and mentor, and unmatched interpreter of the American songbook.

Takes a candid, unvarnished look at the amazing life of one of America''s most enduring musical icons Based on dozens of author interviews with Bennett''s family members,?agents, musicians, composers and managers, and experts on the last fifty years of popular musicFilled with stories involving leading figures and entertainers of the twentieth-century, including Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fiorello LaGuardia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ray Charles, Dean Martin, Billie Holliday, and more

Whether you''ve been a Tony Bennett fan for decades or are just discovering him, this book will deepen your understanding of this hugely gifted entertainer and his music.

In this first biography of Woody Allen in over a decade, David Evanier discusses key movies, plays and prose as well as Allen''s personal life. Evanier tackles the themes that Allen has spent a lifetime sorting through in art: morality, sexuality, Judaism, the eternal struggle of head and heart. Woody will be the definitive word on a major American talent as he begins his ninth decade, and his sixth decade of making movies.

A brilliant tragicomedy based on the most infamous espionage trial of the twentieth centuryThirty years after they walked hand in hand to the electric chair, sentenced to die for giving the gift of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, Solomon and Dolores Rubell are the targets of a new investigation—conducted not by the FBI, or some paranoid Senate subcommittee, but by Gerald Lerner, boyhood Communist and author of such classic chronicles of the American Jewish experience as Hot Pastrami Sandwich and Kosher and Topless. What does Gerald hope to find, all these years later, by placing ads in the Jewish Daily Forward and Screw seeking former Soviet spies willing to chat?The short answer: His sanity.With a gleam in its eye and tenderness in its heart, David Evanier’s irreverent and incisive novel peers into one of the darkest chapters in American history—the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Because, as Suzie Sizzle—great-niece of Dolly and Solly Rubell and star of a “goodly number” of hardcore films—explains to Gerald, this is not really a story about death, despite its gloomy ending. It is a story about love—the true love two proud Jewish underdogs had for each other, and the misguided love an entire generation of American leftists had for a political system whose grand promises masked terrible, irreconcilable truths.They say love will make you do crazy things. So, too, will Communism.

A profoundly funny—and comically profound—story collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary American fictionWhen his dying psychiatrist gives him the tapes to thirty years’ worth of therapy sessions, what else can Michael Goldberg do but listen? It is the story of his life, after all—never mind the fact that it’s narrated by a younger version of himself who has no idea what’s going to happen next.Besides, as a man of letters best known for “My Mother Is Not Living,” the story that earned him a reputation as “the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer,” Michael has never been especially concerned with the niceties of literary convention. What he really wants, what he’s been looking for from New York to Hollywood and back again—from doomed high school romances to a late marriage begun in sin and overshadowed by tragedy, from boyhood days playing stickball in the streets of Queens to middle-aged afternoons behind a desk at the activist organization Jewish Punchers, sorting masses of data into one of two files: “Good for the Jews” or “Bad for the Jews”—are answers. To life’s great mysteries, sure, but mainly to the one question that always seems to be waiting for him, wherever he goes: How did I end up here?What Michael discovers in his therapist’s tapes, and what David Evanier so masterfully portrays in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection, is a life that is no less inevitable for being unplanned, and no less extraordinary for being average.

Signature David Evanier—a story collection so wickedly funny and painfully honest you won’t know whether to laugh, cry, or curl up in a ball and moan with delightNew York writer Bruce Orav is crumbling. Every time his father speaks—“I thought there was a chance you’d have a bestseller sometime. I guess that’s dead, huh?”—Bruce loses another piece of himself. The same thing happens at the Jewish philanthropic organization where he earns a steady, if not exactly generous, paycheck and is regularly subjected to the musings of Luther, his cynical coworker: “My experience has always been that kids are cannibals and killers.” Not even the weekly volunteer visits he and his wife, Susan, make to an elderly Jewish woman’s home give Bruce the chance to stitch himself back together again—every trip is marred by another wildly inappropriate and combative scene between the quarrelsome eighty-four-year-old and her African American caretakers.With nowhere safe to turn, what is Bruce to do? His therapist wants him to join a dating club, but there is only one real answer: Keep living, because the future—fingers crossed—is almost guaranteed to be better than the past. And, just as important, keep laughing. Thankfully, David Evanier is here to make the laughter part as easy as reading The One-Star Jew.

Con más de cuarenta y cinco películas dirigidas y una larga carrera como actor, cómico, escritor y músico de jazz, Woody Allen es uno de los artistas más polifacéticos de nuestro tiempo. Desde sus inicios con El dormilón, hasta su último estreno Café Society, todas las películas de Woody Allen tienen una inconfundible sensibilidad que es solo suya. En esta biografía nueva y completa, David Evanier analiza sus principales obras en paralelo con la agitada vida personal de Allen. Para ello ha entrevistado largamente a sus colaboradores, familia y amigos, entre ellos a la primera esposa de Woody, Harlene Rosen, que nunca había hablado de él desde su divorcio en la década de 1960. El sexo, el amor, la suerte, la moral, el judaísmo, la eterna lucha entre la cabeza y el corazón son los temas que han obsesionado a Woody Allen y que permean toda su obra y muchos episodios de su vida. David Evanier habla de todo ello, y no elude el relato completo y objetivo del largo litigio que le enfrenta desde hace décadas con su expareja Mia Farrow tras emprender una relación con la hija adoptiva de esta y ser acusado de abusos a la pequeña que adoptaron en común. Esta es la biografía definitiva, la más actualizada y personal: con todos ustedes, la vida y la obra de Woody Allen.