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
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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