A well-tempered song of praise.
New York Times editor Whitney (Spy Trader, 1993) crafts a joyful and well-versed celebration of the pipe organ in American musical history over the past century.
For sheer musical power and sonority, pipe organs are hard to beat. The author, who has been playing them for 40 years, here chronicles the struggle for the soul of the organ that took place in the US during the 20th century. He starts with Ernest Skinner, an organ builder who developed the eclectic electropneumatic instrument with its smooth orchestral sound, and continues through the renaissance of the classic baroque tracker-action organ. Whitney has a fine old time describing the architecture of the instruments from windchest to whistle, as well as their special qualities, strengths, and weaknesses. Occasional ventures “up to the chirping stops of the one-foot sifflote on the positive,” or “the enclosed swell division with a romantic voix celeste” give us a peek into the musicality of the nomenclature, without being so frequent as to become annoying. The author introduces other makers, including G. Donald Harrison, who brightened Skinner's instruments and then spearheaded the classic revival, and Charles Fisk, who revived the eclectic organ. Whitney also profiles the enormously popular organists Virgil Fox and E. Power Biggs, ably reflecting the character of each: strict, cool, clipped Biggs, who along with Harrison championed the return of an organ that Bach and Handel would have recognized as their own; and colorful, dashing, brilliant Fox, who loved the orchestral organ for its ability to show off his romantic, 19th-century playing style. But the star here is the pipe organ itself, pneumatic or tracker, with its great peals of sound that in the hands of someone like Bach render the instrument “awe-inspiring in its majesty and solemnity, proclaiming the power and the order of the universe.”
A well-tempered song of praise.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59648-173-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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