A real eye-opener, though it could have been more elegantly written and argued.
Oboist Tindall debuts with a provocative blend of no-holds-barred memoir and tough-minded reporting about the state of classical music.
Born in 1960, Tindall played the piano in elementary school and switched to the oboe at age 11. She was an indifferent student at her Chapel Hill, N.C., school, but music won her praise and pretty concert clothes similar to the “magic dress” she’d yearned for ever since she saw a magnificently garbed opera singer in Vienna at age seven. During the 1970s, it was easy to get scholarships to places like the North Carolina School of the Arts, scathingly depicted by the author as rife with drugs, sex and predatory teachers who hit on the students while doing nothing to prepare them academically for any career other than music. Interspersed with Tindall’s personal story are chapters tracing the arts boom that greatly increased funding for classical music organizations, which promptly expanded with little thought for whether their audience base justified lengthier seasons, expensive new buildings and overpaid star conductors and performers. The results were ballooning deficits and a floating proletariat of musicians who, like Tindall, patched together a professional career of freelance gigs without ever getting a permanent orchestra seat or any real financial and emotional stability. Problematically, the author’s tone is sour and disillusioned from the first page; readers never feel that she had a real vocation or even much love for the music. Tindall’s clunky prose and overuse of that “magic dress” metaphor are also off-putting. But her relentless catalogue of criticisms is ultimately too convincing to be dismissed. She eventually got a master’s degree in journalism and made her mark with a controversial New York Times article about the inflated salaries of executives and conductors at nonprofit (indeed, financially floundering) classical music organizations. She urges young people considering a career in music to “research the reality” and advises taxpayers to insist that their local arts institutions be fiscally responsible.
A real eye-opener, though it could have been more elegantly written and argued.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-890-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© 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.
