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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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