David HajduNot since the heavenly dressing crew worked its miracle in Cabin in the Sky has anyone labored as hard to rehabilitate Waters's image as Donald Bogle has in writing Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters. Bogle, a historian of African-American entertainment and the autho…has researched Waters thoroughly and presents, fastidiously, the great many facts of her long life and career…The story he tells is a complex one of an almost tyrannically ambitious artist who broke racial barriers through a delicate and treacherous combination of will and accommodation.
—The New York Times
Publishers WeeklyIn this powerful biography, Bogle recovers the rich fullness of singer Ethel Waters's life (1896–1977). In vivid though often exhausting detail, Bogle traces Waters's rise from the poverty of her surroundings in Chester, Pa.
