Sometimes arid, but useful for Tchaikovsky completists, as well as patient listeners hoping to expand their knowledge of the...
A broad survey of the Russian composer’s life in the context of his major works, and vice versa.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–93) wrote musical works that remain current today, some having been appropriated for commercials (such as the 1812 Overture) and made into seasonal standards (such as the Nutcracker Ballet). As Brown (Musicology/Southampton Univ.; Tchaikovsky, 1992, etc.) shows, listeners owe those works to some good luck and chance encouragement, for Tchaikovsky trained as a lawyer and seemed destined for a career somewhere along the long corridors of the tsarist Ministry of Justice. Desperate to escape suffocation there, he enrolled in classes taught at the Russian Music Society and quickly impressed his teachers and fellow students with works that would in some instances reemerge in maturity, such as “an orchestral piece, Characteristic Dances, which Tchaikovsky would later rehabilitate into his first opera, The Voyevoda.” The budding composer also grappled with questions of sexual identity, and Brown offers a cautious view on that confusion, which Tchaikovsky apparently hoped to remedy by marrying. His union was unhappy, the increasingly famous composer depressive; Brown traces moods and moments throughout the major works, identifying the circumstances of composition and offering suggested listening alongside a given life episode, which begs for a bundled CD. Brown also offers measured and quite learned musical criticism, arguing, for instance, the relative merits of certain pieces, as with The Sleeping Beauty, which is “as focused as can be, with a far smaller proportion of purely decorative dancing such as dilutes Swan Lake, with a scenario that is consistently as ‘dramatic’ as possible, and with a composer who now had all the insight and skill demanded by such a challenge.”
Sometimes arid, but useful for Tchaikovsky completists, as well as patient listeners hoping to expand their knowledge of the great composer’s work.Pub Date: April 21, 2007
ISBN: 1-933648-30-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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