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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
