Blainey writes with contagious enthusiasm for Melba and her resplendent world.
Portrait of the legendary soprano describes an operatic existence.
Born in Australia in 1861, Nellie Melba gave her first concert at the age of six. At 17, she left school to begin serious voice study. Her métier was bel canto singing, notable for its pure, flowing tones. Although the form had faded somewhat from popularity by the 1870s, spirited, headstrong Melba made it her signature style for life. Blainey (Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters, 2001, etc.) meticulously follows the trajectory of a career that largely soared unimpeded. In Europe, Melba’s trills impressed Mathilde Marchesi, a daunting, imperious teacher who became her lifelong mentor. Soon after, the soprano garnered acclaim from the international press when she sang Rigoletto in Brussels. Bravas followed at the Paris Opera and, eventually, Covent Garden in London. Next came appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and on tour throughout America. Timing seemed always on Melba’s side; the invention of the gramophone in the early 1900s made her an early recording star and preserved her voice for posterity. Along the way, a few critics carped about her hesitant acting and deemed her unsuitable for such heavy roles as Aida and Desdemona in Otello. Virtually everyone else rhapsodized, setting off “Melbamania.” Her personal affairs went less smoothly. She married before she left Australia; her husband was at first hostile to her career, then eager to appropriate its financial rewards for himself. In 1890 Melba embarked on an affair with glamorous Philippe, duc d’Orléans. When her husband sued for divorce in 1891, the resulting publicity eventually ended the affair, and Melba was separated for decades from her beloved son. Nonetheless, the overall impression is of a life replete with grand moments, such as the moonlit night in Venice when the diva sang from a gondola, with a procession of lantern-lit vessels following, their occupants attending raptly as her voice echoed through the lagoons.
Blainey writes with contagious enthusiasm for Melba and her resplendent world.Pub Date: March 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56663-809-8
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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