The second biography of legendary ragtime composer Joplin to appear this year (the first was Susan Curtis's Dancing to a Black Man's Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin, p. 450), written from the perspective of a musicologist. Like Curtis, Berlin (Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History, 1980) is frustrated by the scarcity of evidence—either oral or documentary—that remains about Joplin's life. His whereabouts for entire years are missing, and the reasons for several key decisions that he made regarding the publication and performance of his music are shrouded in mystery. Thus, while Berlin gives a more-or-less straightforward chronological account, he is often reduced to making educated guesses. Given these drawbacks, Berlin has done a dogged job of digging up what little documentary evidence exists; he even proves that Joplin had a second wife, who died shortly after their marriage. He analyzes Joplin's musical compositions at length, in language that graduate students of musicology will enjoy (``[Joplin] had discovered the propulsive power of...goal directed voice-leading''), if not the general reader. Berlin's insights into Joplin's compositional process are enlightening; he reveals that the composer worked on paper, enabling him to create unusually complex harmonic structures. Joplin was only a mediocre pianist himself, and so rarely performed; he even had to learn to play some of his harder pieces. Berlin also goes beyond analyzing the ragtime compositions (``Maple Leaf Rag,'' ``The Entertainer'') that are most closely associated with the composer, giving balanced and generally fair accounts of Joplin's popular songs, parlor piano pieces, and his ill-fated opera, Treemonisha. The book concludes with a brief history of the ragtime revival and a complete list of Joplin's works. Together, Curtis and Berlin give about as much information as we can hope for on this important American composer. For one-stop shoppers, Berlin edges out the competition, thanks to his more thorough knowledge of music. (Illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508739-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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