Musical in structure, tone and emotional effect.
An author of scholarly works about George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) returns with a more general work about the prolific composer and his milieu.
Harris (Emeritus, Music/MIT; Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas, 2004) notes from the beginning that Handel left few documents—letters, journals—about his personal life, so she elects to reconstruct the various worlds in which he moved. In this lushness of context, she argues, Handel will appear—and so he does. The author also elects to write her text in the fashion of a fugue; she presents themes (Handel’s life, the culture, his friends, his music) and revisits them continually—a very effective way of reminding readers about key points and people. Harris begins with family and then charts Handel’s quick rise in the music world (so little is known about his youth) and his decision to move to England, where he lived the majority of his life and endeared himself both to the royals and the commoners. She examines the vagaries of his financial situation (he did well, for the most part), his various patrons, the composition of his operas (which he stopped doing in 1741) and his sex life—did he have one? He never married, but most of his operas, notes the author, culminated with marriage. After his opera career, Handel shifted to oratorios, and Harris writes engagingly about Messiah, which he premiered in Dublin in 1742. The author tells us much about the lives of his intimates, some of whom were more assiduous about letter- and journal-writing. So, indirectly, we learn some about Handel’s reading, collecting (art, books about music) and his health, which featured some occasional “paralytic attacks” and a final blindness that ended his composing and playing. Harris also includes helpful timelines scattered throughout the text.
Musical in structure, tone and emotional effect.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08895-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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