A popular biography of Russia's most famous composer, with particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation and the controversy surrounding his death. How can you actively dislike a book honest enough to refer the reader on page one to the current ``standard survey of Tchaikovsky's work . . . David Brown's monumental `critical and biographical study' ''? Nonetheless, anyone fortunate enough to have access to the four-volume Brown study or even Brown's slighter Tchaikovsky Remembered will not need this new effort. Biographer Holden (Laurence Olivier, 1988, etc.) weighs in on the side of those scholars who assess the composer's guilt over his homosexuality as the dominant theme of his emotional life. Convinced that his death at age 53 was the result not of cholera (the official explanation) but of suicide brought on by fear of official exposure as a sodomist, Holden even sides with those who believe that Tchaikovsky was condemned to self-destruction by the verdict of a ``court of honor'' made up of his old law school classmates. This may be, although the biographer admits that the evidence is not conclusive and that even if Tchaikovsky's conduct had become known to the tsar, the sort of punishment and ruin that befell Oscar Wilde cannot be automatically assumed. What, if anything, all this tabloid-worthy detail adds to a listener's appreciation of Tchaikovsky's ravishing music or the prodigious quantity of his artistic output is unclear. Despite the author's stated desire to connect the music to the composer's suffering, little of real intellectual nourishment is offered. A list of ``Recommended Recordings'' is so lacking in cogent annotation as to be virtually worthless. The basic facts are here and it's not badly written, but this is not the kind of artist's biography that fulfills its primary function: sending the reader back to the music with eager ears and new insight.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42006-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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