This biography of barrier-smashing cellist du PrÇ (1945—87) is the literary equivalent of an Çtude: important for the lessons it teaches, but dry and decidedly lacking in musicality. No one can quibble with the author’s attention to detail. A professional cellist who wrote this biography with the cooperation of du PrÇ’s widower, pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, Wilson gives an exhaustive, nearly day-by-day recounting of her subject’s concert life: Elgar’s Cello Concerto here, followed two days later by a performance of the Bach’s C Minor Suite for Unaccompanied Cello there, etc. She relies heavily on contemporary reviews and the comments of today’s classical music stars to explain exactly how du PrÇ fared in each and every performance. All of this is interesting enough, but it hardly captures the flair of one of the most exciting people to hit the classical music scene in the 20th century, not to mention a woman who almost singlehandedly opened up the predominantly male field of cello playing. An exuberant, musical dynamo known for powerful, evocative, and provocative playing, du PrÇ deserves more emotional analysis, especially in light of the unorthodox personal life now widely familiar through her brother and sister’s book (A Genius in the Family by Hilary Finzi and Piers du PrÇ, not reviewed) and the popular new film based on it, Hilary and Jackie. Du PrÇ’s open affair with Hilary’s husband, for example, receives about three pages here, and the author fails to dwell at length on du PrÇ’s battle with multiple sclerosis, which struck her down in the prime of life and career, ultimately killing her at age 42. Wilson would have been better off summarizing du PrÇ’s irrefutable abilities and spending more time analyzing the human relationships and complexities that made her so able to soar via music. Informative but ultimately unsatisfying. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-490-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
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
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