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Rating: 
Summary: Is there all that is?
Review: Considering talents of both Tony Bennett and Will Friewald,I was very disapointed with such a feather-light collection of show-biz anecdotes.Bennett is a classy singer whom I really appreciate,with both taste and style,while Friewald already stunned me with his books about Jazz singers and Frank Sinatra.... its a little,tiny,short book that strangely lacks any personal comments and views - not different from Duke Ellington's famous autobiography in which he mostly lists his "dear friends and colleagues" with short anecdotes about how he met them,but no opinions whatsoever.Bennett goes into detailed count of every piano player in his long career,but some important points of his life (wife,children,divorce,drug addiction) are mentioned briefly and in one sentence.While counting backing musicians perhaps shows good nature and warm personality,both Ellington and Bennetts books are too breezy considering they are coming from music giants - just another proof that not every talented musician/singer/actor is capable of writting a interesting book.
Rating: 
Summary: Kudos To Tony
Review: I came away disappointed by this book. While there are many insights into how Tony became such a great man and the best singer this planet has ever know, the book is too much of a long list of names and dates, and not much more. It needed more depth in some areas and less of "<name>, one of my all-time best friends and the greatest <singer, pianist, drummer, whatever> ever." Still, Tony's fans need to read it anyway, to understand his committment to excellence and to appreciate how he never wavered from that committment, for which we can all be thankful -- it is why we will always have his legacy. Jazz musicians in particular will love the introductory quote from the surprising source of John Steinbeck.
Rating:
Summary: The real Tony for all to see.
Review: I loved being let in on Tony's life and times. This book just shows he's as loveable and human as he is talented and adored.
Rating:
Summary: Kudos To Tony
Review: Thank you Tony - for your great story! Well written & well told, never a dull moment. What a warm, wonderful & multitalented man! I agree with the reviewer from NY, Tony's story would make an excellent movie. God Bless you, Tony, & keep those glorious albums coming.
Rating: 
Summary: A surprisingly good read, in many ways . . .
Review: There's a Bennett anecdote I remember hearing reported on local (San Francisco) radio back in the early '60s: A local woman, gardening in her backyard one Saturday afternoon, was listening to Bennett's then-new "I Left My Heart In San Francisco;" suddenly, she realized, the singing had become somehow stereophonic. Looking up, she found Tony Bennett grinning at her over her backyard fence. In town for an appearance at the Fairmont Hotel, Bennett had been out for a walk; hearing her phonograph, he'd been unable to resist . . .This is the Tony Bennett you get to meet in the pages of "The Good Life." If you're a fan, nothing in this book will change your mind. If you're not, well then, despite the fact that there does appear a certain sense of "glossiness" in his account of his life, loves, marriages, etc., you may well find yourself coming to nonetheless admire the man. A word about that "glossiness": It may well arise from nothing more than a yearning towards fairness (and not only to himself). He discusses failed marriage, for example, as well as his work-induced absences as a parent, taking responsibility for his actions without -- on the one hand -- pointing out that it "takes two to tangle," or -- on the other -- seeking to overly justify his absences as the price of building a successful career. He also talks of his marijuana use (as first disclosed by his exwife, years after they'd split) in an explanatory tone, with regret, and without seeking to justify that use. Again, there is a sense of fairness about him, even as he talks of a fairly prevalent drug use among musicians of the era. In his desire to explain the musician's life and its pressures and demands, there is what some may (wrongfully)interpret as an impulse to self-expiate. This is wrong, as evidenced, not only by his own mea culpa approach, but by his account of a conversation with longtime friend -- and onetime collaborator -- Bill Evans, shortly before the latter's death. This fairness carries over in his account of his early disputes with then-Columbia Records A&R head, Mitch Miller (best remembered today, probably, for his subsequent "Sing Along With Mitch" records and TV series of the late '50s). By all accounts, Miller was -- to say the least -- dictatorial and patriarchial in his belief that he knew what was best for the artists under his control. Bennett could have savaged the man in this account (and justifiably); after all, Miller's long gone from the scene, others have already reminisced about his iron-handed control; so what stops Bennett . . . save for a humanistic impulse toward fairness? For me, one of the most telling portions of this autobiography occur in Bennett's recounting of his World War II experiences as a G.I. in the European theatre. Without self-aggrandizement, he talks -- movingly so -- of what he saw, and how those horrors turned him against war for all time; strikingly, it is this same absence of 'been-there-done-that' self-absorption that colors (and which underplays) the reminiscences of his considerable involvement in the early-60s civil rights movement down in Mississipi-Alabama. If he avoids the urge to expiate himself, he likewise eschews the temptation towards self-canonization. From his August 3, 1926 birth (one day too late, by the way, to be my twenty-years-older "birthday twin"), through the intervening years including his "renaissance" for yet future generations via MTV, Bennett presents himself in this autobiography as a man who caught more than his share of lucky breaks (and who, inferentially, made a few more of his own, although you won't get him to admit it, at least in this book) on his way to (as in the title of one his best-known songs) "The Good Life."
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