If D.W. Fostle produced a lush Mahler symphony in recounting the rise and fall of the first family of pianos (The Steinway Saga, p. 356), Lieberman, using the same theme of an American dynasty's seasons in the sun, has created a more compact and disciplined concerto for piano and orchestra. Director of CUNY's LaGuardia-Wagner Archives, which house a considerable collection of Steinway papers, the author draws on a variety of sources, including many tapped by Fostle. Like Fostle, too, he makes a fine job of detailing how a close-knit German clan (known in the Old World as Steinweg) came to America in 1850 and was able for many years to combine commerce with culture. With comparatively few digressions, however, Lieberman offers an accessible, straightforward chronological narrative that puts the family firm and its stewards clearly in the context of their times. While Steinway's prize-winning instruments sold at a profitable pace well into the 20th century, adversarial labor relations, two global wars, economic slumps, imports (mainly from Japan), shifts in consumer tastes, and technological innovations helped erode the one-product company's market. Dispirited Steinway heirs sold out to CBS, Inc. in 1971. During the 1980s, the network bailed out as well, dealing Steinway to a Boston-based group that has yet to realize much of a return on its investment. A tidy package for those who want the facts, plus a bit more, on merchant music makers overtaken by events and their own inability to adapt. (70 photos and illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06364-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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