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
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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