A boon for opera-lovers hungry to learn more about Raisa’s story now that her once-rare recordings are being released on CD....
A thorough if dry biography of Rosa Raisa, a star of the Chicago Opera during the first half of the 20th century whose name curiously disappeared from popular memory as soon as she retired.
Born in Bialystock, Poland, Raitza Burchstein fled the pogroms to Capri at the turn of the century. It didn’t take long for the Italians to appreciate her singing voice, says the star-struck freelance music journalist Mintzer, who traces Raisa’s career from its roots in Italy, where she changed her name, to her grand days in Chicago, stopping to linger over all the globetrotting attendant on being a big-name singer, and concluding with a chronology of her performances. Inserting passages from Raisa’s unpublished autobiography, Mintzer sets the scene for each performance, explains her relations with other singers and the likes of Toscanini and Puccini, and charts her family life, which included numerous miscarriages in her hope to have a child. But he leaves it to contemporaneous newspaper reviewers to give a critical sense of Raisa’s singing. Although there are a few jabs—mostly from New York writers, who may have noted her absence from the ranks of the Metropolitan Opera, or who have been put off by her highly emotive approach and the sheer power of her voice—most of the reviews have nothing but fulsome praise for the soprano. “She possesses a magnificent voice, rich in sonorous and powerful notes of beautiful timbre,” raved the Italians. “The most marvelous, the most glorious voice of any kind or character, barring none, which has come under my observation for many a year,” wrote Max Smith of the New York American.
A boon for opera-lovers hungry to learn more about Raisa’s story now that her once-rare recordings are being released on CD. (Photos throughout)Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2001
ISBN: 1-55553-504-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
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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