photos)
Artistic mastery fraught with tribulation propels this grand finale to the career of a paramount Romantic creator.
To prove his music's greatness, Berlioz had to become a great conductor; to pay his debts he had to undergo servitude as a journalist chained by his own verbal skill (epitomized by the Memoirs, whose "essential truthfulness" Cairns documents throughout). This "dog of a trade and a trade for dogs—always biting or licking" ate away time for composing the music so richly characterized one can almost hear the descriptions. Each major work (Harold in Italy, Romeo and Juliet, The Damnation of Faust, etc.) is seen to demand its own singular genre, while the religious pieces (Requiem, Te Deum) were haunted by a loss of faith (although "his imagination believed"). To conquer Paris was Berlioz's motivating hope, but Cairns details how a succession of governments so monopolized performing venues that every premiere was a battle, and his magnum opus, The Trojans, was never staged at the politics-riddled Op‚ra. Arduous tours, here bracingly re-created, afforded Berlioz heartwarming success in Hungary, London, Russia, and Germany (thanks to Liszt's selfless pioneering)—although friction arose when Berlioz doubted Wagner's new dogmas. (In regard to this last controversy Cairns stresses, "He believed in the future of music, not in the Music of the Future.") Although his later years were heavily clouded with grief—he outlived his wife Harriet Smithson, his son Louis, his second wife, both his sisters, and his still-unpersuaded father—Berlioz was sustained by valiant friendships and a happy rapprochement with a boyhood love. The sick exile who felt nowhere at home was a mere 65 when delivering his deathbed credo: "They are finally going to play my music." A model of biographical empathy, Berlioz transposes this "improbable novel" of a life from tragedy to vindication. (50 b&w
photos)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-520-22200-8
Page Count: 780
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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