Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday

“Clarke bases this substantial biography on transcripts of interviews made in the early 1970s with dozens of people close to Billie Holiday. One of his recurring themes is the often contradictory statements made by Holiday and William Duffy in Lady Sings the Blues; Clarke sets the record straight with page after page of verbatim testimony from Billie’s cohorts, keeping his own interpretive biographical commentary to a minimum. His intelligent organization of the material is supplemented with evidence of solid background reading, and lively, articulate discussions of the recordings reveal Clarke’s great love of the Lady’s music. The singer, her songs, and her society are warmly illuminated in this well-done, major work. Recommended.” —Library Journal

“Finally, we have a definitive biography that not only chronicles every phase of Holiday’s ascent from the streets of Baltimore to the stages of New York’s hottest nightclubs and most prestigious concert halls but also documents every significant recording session, performance, and tour. Clarke is a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer with a thorough understanding of the racist, puritanical culture within which Holiday wrought her powerful and sensual art…Clarke has constructed a documentary-style, multivoiced narrative loaded with vivid anecdotes. We meet the great musicians Holiday worked with, including the inspired, eccentric Lester Young, and the slick, abusive men she took as lovers and husbands. Clarke’s portrait embraces every facet of Holiday’s paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength. An uneducated genius with a fatal appetite for pleasure and pain, Holiday embodied and expressed all that is human, all that is terrible and sublime.” —Booklist (starred review)