As pleasurable as hearing Britten’s music for the first time: familiar, but new and rich enough to keep you coming back.
A probing inquiry into Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), one of England’s greatest modern composers, as well as a survey of mid-20th-century provincial England.
Powell (Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, 2009, etc.) embraces all that was mundane, traditional and familiar to his subject, intentionally interrogating the quotidian relationships, patterns and social norms that informed his creative development. At times, the narrative reads with the comfort of the tried-and-true English cozy, minus the murders. Nevertheless, it is precisely Powell’s focus on Britten’s daily “Englishness” that is the book’s greatest strength. While other authors have focused on Britten’s cosmopolitan contacts and his place within a larger English musical historiography, Powell’s approach allows for readers to understand Britten on his own terms first, terms informed by Britten’s familial relationships, pronounced musical tastes and loyalty to his early musical mentor, Frank Bridge. Inasmuch as Powell’s biography provides many new insights into Britten’s world, it is perhaps the detailed accounts of the relationships between Britten and other important, but underexposed composers that provides the freshest and arguably most useful information. Otherwise little-known bits about John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Thomas Beecham migrate from Britten’s diaries into Powell’s text, often accompanied by Powell’s insightful analysis. The same can be said for the author’s well-crafted discussion of Britten’s close working and personal relationship with W.H. Auden, a relationship otherwise thoroughly examined by past biographers. Although Powell’s conclusions about everything from Britten’s sexual relationships to his interest in particular musical forms occasionally overreach, they at least beg new questions. With Britten’s centennial year quickly approaching, new questions are greatly welcome.
As pleasurable as hearing Britten’s music for the first time: familiar, but new and rich enough to keep you coming back.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9774-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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