(This is Sue Scheible's "A Good Age" column for Aug. 28, 2007.) In his new book, ''The House That George Built,'' writer Wilfred Sheed describes how Howard Dietz, a Hollywood publicist and lyricist, greeted a life crisis with the repeated comment: ''What is life but dancing in the dark?'' Dietz' partner, Howard Schwartz, promptly dashed off a well-preserved tune of the same name.
Press on, improvise, keep the beat. It's one of hundreds of entertaining and thoughtful gems Sheed has mined for this intimate look at the golden age of American popular song - from the 1920s to the 1950s. Writing the book was, he says, ''a labor of love, not a work of scholarship - which means I've been researching it for most of my life, without knowing it.''
Sheed makes it sound (and read) easy. But this detailed and buoyant project is full of carefully interwoven information, insight and wit. The full title is ''The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty.'' He begins with the Tin Pan Alley piano era in New York and composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. The great jazz song writers are next: Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington. Then it's on to the Broadway stage with Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The Hollywood era features Harry Warren, ''the king of the unknowns'' to whom the book is dedicated, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, ''the all-American voice.'' The finale returns to Broadway with the great New York musicals, and Frank Loesser, Burton Lane and Cy Coleman. The 309-page hardback is published by Random House for $29.95.
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