The third and concluding volume of Brown's monumental study (1983, 1986) of the Russian composer—which combines detailed musicological analysis (including generous excerpts from scores) with thorough, if not especially penetrating, life-history. As Brown himself says, ``it is a paradox of the professional man's biography that its externals can become less interesting as its subject's distinction and fame grow.'' So it is here: much of this undramatic book chronicles Tchaikovsky's late-blooming conducting career and his many tours. Even more space is devoted to critiques of the operas The Queen of Spades and Iolantha; the ballets Sleeping Beauty (which Brown finds profound as well as beautiful) and The Nutcracker (which Brown clearly loathes); and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the former a ``compromise'' between Russian soul and Western form, the latter an uncompromising triumph, ``surely the most truly original symphony to have been composed'' since Beethoven's Ninth. Throughout, Brown is properly cautious—but not unimaginative—about finding autobiography in the music. The composer's homosexuality is mentioned occasionally, matter-of-factly, downplayed (to a fault, perhaps) rather than overplayed as in last fall's speculative biography by Alexander Poznansky. And, as for Tchaikovsky's death, Brown finds suicide the ``inescapable conclusion.'' Not the last word, of course: glasnost is likely to open up previously closed Tchaikovsky archives. But, for now, a solid windup to the critical biography for serious students and knowledgeable music-lovers.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03099-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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