A comprehensive biography of the great coloratura whose role as a symbol of early civil rights efforts almost overshadowed her triumphs as a singer. Author Keiler (Music/Brandeis Univ.) has interviewed nearly 100 people and culled published and unpublished accounts to track Anderson’s life from her childhood in Philadelphia to her death at 96. Her talent recognized and supported early on by her family and community (“Come and hear the baby contralto, ten years old,” boasted one flier), Anderson nevertheless struggled to finish high school and find voice teachers. Tours of southern colleges helped her build confidence, but she was also frustrated by Jim Crow laws. Forays into Europe eventually led to huge success; the New York Times critic proclaimed Anderson “one of the great singers of our time.” With Sol Hurok as her manager, she toured the world for the next quarter of a century, sometimes giving as many as 80 concerts a year. But it was her rejection by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who refused to let her sing in their Washington, D.C., concert hall, that made her an icon. An estimated 75,000 people came to hear her at the substitute concert held in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Keiler lays out carefully the black activist strategy that led to that triumph, and never forgets as he recounts Anderson’s continuing successes both in music and politics’she was a US delegate to the UN—and her humiliations and rebuffs because she was a dark-skinned black woman. Though he gives few details about the development of the remarkable voice that Toscanini described as heard “once in a hundred years,” Anderson aficionados, will cheer his list of her repertory, discography, and survey of “live material” (unissued tapes and recordings). A commendable, carefully researched womb to tomb story of a great lady, especially praiseworthy in capturing the difficulties facing an extraordinarily talented black artist in a recalcitrant white world. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80711-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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