A well-rounded portrait of an imperious woman and her eventful life.
Biography of a woman of “powerful allure” who attracted men of genius.
Biographer, historian, and filmmaker Haste (Craigie Aitchinson: A Life in Colour, 2014, etc.) creates a sharp, sympathetic portrait of the sexually and emotionally voracious Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964), whose three husbands and many lovers brought her both prestige and notoriety. A gifted composer, she gave up a career in music to devote herself to her first husband, Gustav Mahler, who swept her off her feet while at the same time stringently delineating the terms of their marriage: “It’s not so simple to marry a person like me,” he told her. “I am free and must be free. I cannot be bound, or tied to one spot.” He was 41 and she 22 when they married, and although both had doubts, Alma was convinced that she could not live without him. “I felt that only he could shape my life,” she recalled. “I sensed his true worth and significance, which placed him streets ahead of every other man I had met.” There was no lack of men—artists, musicians, and other creative types—in pursuit of the beautiful Alma, and Haste draws largely on Alma’s sometimes self-serving diaries and memoirs to recount her affairs before, after, and during her several marriages. Life with Mahler proved difficult. He was demanding, and without her own music to sustain her, Alma felt bored, suffocated, and subject to “nervous torments.” After Mahler’s death, “a series of suitors” lavished attention on the 32-year-old widow, “a statuesque beauty with a magnetic charisma.” As much as she longed to return to composing, she longed, even more, to be worshiped. She married handsome young architect Walter Gropius, had a passionate affair with “the provocative, savage, eccentric artist” Oscar Koskoschka, divorced Gropius, and eventually married poet Franz Werfel. Haste is cleareyed about Alma’s emotional neediness, her “occasional intransigence,” and her “deeply conservative, anti-Semitic” political views.
A well-rounded portrait of an imperious woman and her eventful life.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09671-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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