When this book is good, it's very good, and when it's bad (with apologies to Mae West), it's still pretty good.

Michael Feinstein has a dual career--as music historian and show business personality. Most of this book is about Feinstein's career as an archival historian. That is fortunate, for Feinstein's knowledge of the American popular song is encyclopedic, and his insights into it are perceptive and often unique.

The most important event in Michael Feinstein's life was working for Ira Gershwin. He entered the Gershwin household in 1977 to catalogue some old records, but he quickly became Ira's friend and advisor. In the six years he worked for the Gershwins, he came to know virtually all the living composers and lyricists of the America's "golden age." About half of the book details Feinstein's years in the Gershwin household and makes fascinating reading. Part of the interest is in learning what Feinstein turned up in various closets and drawers. Anyone who has enjoyed scrounging for records or sheet music in flea markets can identify with Feinstein's enthusiasm upon finding what were considered to be lost scores or lyrics in the most unlikely places.

The most exciting chapter, however, describes Feinstein's work in a Warner Brothers warehouse sifting through boxes of priceless sheet music and original scores that had been lost for decades. Working with representatives from the Kern, Porter, Youmans, and Rodgers and Hart estates, Feinstein helped unearth, among other things, the complete original score to Showboat and eighty-seven original Gershwin manuscripts.

The best chapters, however, are not autobiographical. They are analyses of songwriters and lyricists. These chapters make such good reading because Feinstein's views don't always fit the popular mold. Feinstein regards Cole Porter, for example, as a better lyricist than composer: "a lot of his melodies [are] more perspirational than inspirational. They are contrived by the mind, not the heart" (206). His assessment of Irving Berlin transcends those personal eccentricities that have exasperated so many researchers (and colored their view of Berlin's work): "In every age, generations of people have been grateful for his ability to express their feelings in his deceptively simple way. . . . I can only be awed by the mixture of craftsmanship, unsentimental emotion, and, yes, divine inspiration in [his] songs" (223). Feinstein also has some revisionist views about performers. He dislikes Sinatra's style because it "has nothing to do with the song and everything to do with his machismo persona" (287). To cite more examples would be to diminish one's enjoyment of the book. Suffice to say, Feinstein's analyses of great American music and its makers are sometimes controversial but always insightful.

The last third of the book is more conventionally autobiographical. Feinstein writes about his career as a performer, beginning in Columbus piano bars, gradually working his way into nightclubs (first the seedy, then the posh), becoming the after-dinner entertainment at private Beverly Hills social events, and finally ending up on Broadway. Feinstein has little to say about the trials and rewards of performance that hasn't been said before. But this section of the book is seasoned with so many wry anecdotes of the rich and famous that it keeps one reading.