Volume two of a contemporary monument in musical biography. More than twenty years ago de La Grange published the first volume (1973) of his life of composer/conductor Gustav Mahler. De La Grange proceeded through the first 40 years of Mahler's life, packed with creative work and emotional turmoil, on virtually a week-by-week (sometimes day-by-day) basis, claiming that the extraordinary length and detail of his book were necessitated by gaps in the written record occasioned by two world wars and the flux of national boundaries in Eastern Europe. The good news is that the second volume—which covers Mahler's legendary opera productions in Vienna, the anti-Semitism he battled against, his composition of the middle-period masterpieces, and his love affair with and marriage to Alma Schindler—is as good as, probably (by dint of the interest of its subject matter) better than, volume one. (The bad news is that this volume covers only the years between 1897 and 1904 in Vienna; volume three will complete the Vienna years, and volume four the New York years.) The approach is once again comprehensive. Thousands of letters, newspaper articles, and manuscript sources illuminate every corner of Mahler's life during the seven years in question. We are told the particulars of his favorite dessert and promised the recipe in an appendix to volume three. Nonetheless, such minutiae are not allowed to obscure the central fact that enabled Mahler to pursue his phenomenally challenging dual career as composer and conductor: his unshakable aesthetic. It is evident in every one of his many judgments and projects, extending from the largest compositional design to his informed rebuke of a tenor at the Vienna opera who was trying to worm out of singing Die Fledermaus on the grounds that light opera was ``beneath him.'' Against this artistic background, the complexity of Mahler's emotional life becomes easier to comprehend. A must-have for music libraries and all but the most superficial Mahler-ites.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-315159-6
Page Count: 1100
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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