Alma Mahler-Werfel had a knack with men. She married Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Mahler; and she had liaisons with many more similarly famous artists. Born into the most sophisticated and forward-looking artistic circles of old Vienna, Alma, nÇe Schindler, did not need to exert herself to meet the day’s most famous; she knew them all. These diaries of her young adulthood begin in 1898, when she is 19 years old, and end in 1902, when she meets and marries Gustav Mahler. But until that moment she writes faithfully to and of herself, trying especially to find her way through the complex erotic life of fin-de-siäcle Vienna. The first would-be lover is none other than Gustav Klimt, famous for his large-scale erotic paintings. But her mother and stepfather catch onto his clumsy attempts at seduction before the affair goes too far. Soon there are other seducers and suitors, including especially composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Alma in fact seems to have been serious about him in her own self-absorbed and overheated way, but Gustav Mahler easily sweeps all competitors aside. Apart from Alma’s budding sexuality (as an example of its time and place), the appeal and importance of these diaries probably resides in her account of daily life in very interesting circles. She is young and often giddy, but she also knows a good deal about new movements in art and music. Her customary snap judgments do not interest much, but the day-by-day account of where she went, whom she met, and what she saw or listened to gives a good notion of daily life in Vienna at its peak. The introduction by the editors (Beaumont is a conductor, researcher, and musicologist; he and Rode-Breymann edited the German edition of the diaries) is uninformative. Readers seeking a clearer picture of her story should seek it in the second volume of Henry-Louis de La Grange’s monumental Mahler biography.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8014-3654-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
