Inspired by an interviewer trusted as a confidant, five world-class musicians help him sketch engrossing self-portraits. Orchestra founder Blum (Casals and the Art of Interpretation, not reviewed) knows that “a person with artistic gifts will usually develop in one of two ways: as an artist at the expense of others, or as a human being at the expense of art.” Yet his forthcoming subjects reveal how, despite diverse trials, they avoided either trap. Soprano Birgit Nilsson overcame voice-damaging instructors. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, son of traditional Chinese parents, had to tame his own Americanized teenage wildness. Russian- born violinist Josef Gingold, longtime Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster, writhed under cruelty as an immigrant boy. Pianist Richard Goode, celebrated for his Schubert and Beethoven, still wrestles with dire stage fright. Jeffrey Tate, certified as a doctor, turned full-time conductor only after pain from his deformed spine acted like a “refiner’s fire.” As these highly accomplished performers reflect unpretentiously on their core musical experiences, Blum weaves in commentary from colleagues and partners, cherishing the incidental humanizing touch: Goode heading for a campus concert, a bag of books and scores on his back, still the student; devoted teacher Gingold’s “jealous mistress” of a violin challenging him each morning: —I dare you”; Nilsson, known for her aquavit wit, pausing at the local churchyard to water her parents’ grave. Striving to cast sound into words, and laud towering talents without fawning, Blum occasionally turns grandiloquent, but he never obstructs our view as his sitters answer what must have been prescient questions with fluent candor. The author’s illness precluded updating these previously published heroes’ tales before his 1996 death; this memorial would have benefited from a current discography. As good writers about art should, Blum sends the reader back to the works afresh’seeking these five interpreters as mentors. (5 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8014-3731-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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