A nearly impossible task, recording this lush life, but Shawn helps us comprehend the magic.
A few luscious slices from the massive cake that was the life of the great pianist, composer, conductor and public personality (1918-1990).
In this latest entry in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, Shawn (Composition and Music History/Bennington Coll.; Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life, 2007, etc.) begins with some vignettes and then embraces chronology, confessing the impossibility of confining such a life as Bernstein’s between the covers of a book. We learn about his parents, his schooling (Boston Latin and Harvard, where he emerged as a star) and his early realization that he “was physically attracted to both sexes.” Although Shawn does not focus intently on Bernstein’s sex life (there are more urgent items on his agenda), he does remind us throughout that Bernstein had a variety of lovers, as well as a long, sometimes-troubled marriage and three children. The author describes Bernstein’s gift as a pianist and his segue into conducting; his big break came in 1943, when he stepped in to conduct the New York Philharmonic, a life-changing success. Since he has few pages and a lot to discuss, Shawn can pause only occasionally to discuss a Bernstein composition in detail (he does so with The Age of Anxiety and Candide, among others). But the author reminds us of Bernstein’s long-lost music for Peter Pan and writes with near reverence about his 53 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Shawn also discusses West Side Story (and the genesis of Bernstein’s friendship with young lyricist Stephen Sondheim), his passion for Mahler, his championing of American classical music, the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and his liberal social and political stances. (He once attended a Jimi Hendrix concert.) Shawn gives some space to Bernstein’s critics, as well, and he does not neglect the composer’s final sad slide.
A nearly impossible task, recording this lush life, but Shawn helps us comprehend the magic.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-14428-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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