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"In this vividly written narrative, Jody Rosen provides both the fascinating story behind the making of America's favorite Christmas carol and a cultural history of the nation that embraced it.
Berlin, the Russian-Jewish immigrant who became his adopted country's greatest pop troubadour, had written his magnum opus - what one commentator has called a "holiday Moby-Dick" - a timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past, belief in the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas season, longing for the havens of home and hearth. Today, the song endures not just as an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of the values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of the saga of Jewish-American assimilation.
With insight and wit, Rosen probes the song's musical roots, uncovering its surprising connections to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy and exploring its unique place in popular culture through six decades of recordings by everyone from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC.
White Christmas chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the twenty-first-century present where Berlin's masterpiece lives on as a kind of secular hymn."--BOOK JACKET.
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Previews available in: English
Showing 7 featured editions. View all 7 editions?
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1
White Christmas: The Story of a Song
2017, HarperCollins Publishers Limited
in English
0008245916 9780008245917
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2
White Christmas: The Story of an American Song
July 27, 2007, Scribner
Paperback
in English
0743218760 9780743218764
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3
"White Christmas"
December 1, 2003, Fourth Estate
Paperback
- New Ed edition
1841156329 9781841156323
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5
White Christmas: the story of an American song
2002, Scribner
Hardcover
in English
0743218752 9780743218757
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7
White Christmas: the story of an American song
2002, Fourth Estate
in English
1841156310 9781841156316
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- Created April 30, 2008
- 7 revisions
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December 17, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
April 30, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |