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 Inserting passages from Raisa’s unpublished autobiography, Mintzer sets the scene for each performance, explains her relations with other singers and the likes of Toscanini and Puccini, and charts her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
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
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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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