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 Inserting passages from Raisa’s unpublished autobiography, Mintzer sets the scene for each performance, explains her relations with other singers and the likes of Toscanini and Puccini, and charts her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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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