For the specialist and generalist alike, a wonderful portrayal of a fascinating and likable genius.
A first-rate survey of the enigmatic but brilliant composer’s life and work.
A star pupil of composer/intellectual Ferruccio Busoni, Kurt Weill (1900–50) promised much and did not disappoint. By his early 20s, he had produced prodigious amounts of high-quality instrumental and vocal music. Directing his attention to the theater, he created with playwright Bertolt Brecht Mahagonny-Songspiel, which got him attention, and Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), which got him fame. The Jewish composer was at the height of his powers when driven from Germany by the Nazis. In New York, he turned to the Broadway musical. While he enjoyed success, this career move away from “serious” music was to earn him opprobrium from critics and intellectuals in Europe and America that lasts to the present day. Theater historian Hirsch (Film/Brooklyn College; Harold Prince and the American Musical Theater, not reviewed, etc.) contends that Weill was as much as an innovator in America as he was in Germany; just as he had challenged the conventions that obtained in opera, the dominant musical culture in his homeland, he strove to enlarge the horizons of the American equivalent, the Broadway musical. Hirsch further argues that future innovators like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim owe much to Weill. Displaying an easy familiarity with musical structures and vast knowledge of theater, the author parses Weill’s major theatrical works thoroughly and for the most part persuasively, despite an occasional stretch like the description of the opening of Lost in the Stars. (“The number’s undulating movement suggests the geographical divisions between the rich upper hills where the white families live and the parched lower hills . . . occupied by blacks.”) Hirsch is also a splendid biographer. Making extensive use of primary sources, he succeeds at stripping away Weill’s cerebral public persona and revealing the passionate man beneath. Most enjoyable are the letters to his wife, Lotte Lenya, whose stunningly frank content would no doubt have shocked adversaries who saw only his public, easygoing face.
For the specialist and generalist alike, a wonderful portrayal of a fascinating and likable genius.Pub Date: March 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40375-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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