A unique perspective on the Wagners, centered on the clan’s most controversial member and most tumultuous period.
Austrian historian Hamann (Hitler’s Vienna, 1999) tells the story of a British-born woman who married into Germany’s legendary musical family and befriended the leader of the Third Reich.
Orphaned in 1899, before she turned two, Winifred Williams in 1907 went to live in Germany with the Klindworths, an elderly couple distantly related to her mother. Karl Klindworth, who had studied with Liszt and was friendly with his daughter Cosima, Richard Wagner’s widow, introduced Winifred to the inner circles of the German music scene. At 17, the striking young woman charmed 45-year-old Siegfried Wagner, Cosima’s only son and director of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual staging of the patriarch’s operas. Their marriage made headlines, since Britain and Germany were at war, and Winifred would remain at the heart of a family and country in conflict for decades. The Wagners’ opinions were newsworthy, and in 1923, Siegfried and Winifred both vocally supported a charismatic young politician named Adolf Hitler. Winifred’s bond with the Führer would give her immense satisfaction and worldwide infamy in the years to come. Hamann diligently explores this naïve young woman’s slow seduction by wealth and power. At Bayreuth, tough, strong-willed Winifred handled the business end while her husband concentrated on the artistic side. Her power and confidence rose, and when Siegfried died in 1930, 33-year-old Winifred became head of the family enterprise. Each of the many times the festival was in financial jeopardy, she turned to her famous friend Hitler for support. When events in Germany took a turn grimmer than anything in the Ring, Winifred could do little more than carefully use her influence to rescue friends at risk of persecution, or worse. Providing a complete and thorough portrait of Winifred, Hamann shows how the Wagner legacy became enmeshed in Hitler’s propaganda machine.
A unique perspective on the Wagners, centered on the clan’s most controversial member and most tumultuous period.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101308-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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