Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his...
An engaging memoir of an adventuresome, iconoclastic career.
The composer of 25 operas, 30 movie soundtracks and scores of other works, Glass (b. 1937) reflects on friendship, love, fatherhood and more than 70 years in music. Growing up in Baltimore, he played the flute; by the age of 15, he was the classical music buyer for his father’s record store. As a high school sophomore, he took an early-entrance exam to the University of Chicago. To everyone’s surprise but his, he passed and spent the next four years in that rich intellectual community, reveling in the city’s major, and diverse, musical venues. One question obsessed him: “Where does music come from?” Composing, he decided, might help him find the answer. When he graduated, Glass submitted a small portfolio of compositions as application to Juilliard. Although not admitted immediately because he lacked academic preparation, after a few years as a nonmatriculated student, he earned a scholarship to the school’s small department of composition. Like Chicago, New York opened up a thrilling aesthetic world. To support himself as a student and long after, Glass worked as a furniture mover, sheetrock installer, studio assistant to artist Richard Serra, self-taught plumber and taxi driver. He composed much of his opera Einstein at the Beach, he writes, “at night after driving a cab.” In the 1960s and ’70s, Glass became deeply interested in Eastern culture: hatha yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoist qi gong and tai chi, all of which influenced his music. Equally crucial were his teachers, especially the imperious Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris, and Ravi Shankar. Undaunted by critics who called his music “nonsense,” Glass aimed to create an emotional experience for his listeners, with music that felt “like a force of nature…organic and powerful, and mindful, too.”
Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his own, radically new musical language.Pub Date: April 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-438-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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