An entertaining and useful selection of Prokofiev’s correspondence with prominent figures in Soviet and ÇmigrÇ art, dance, and music circles that brims with the composer’s personality and literary style. After reading but a few of Prokofiev’s letters (appearing in English for the first time), one can easily agree with Robinson’s suggestion that, had he not become a composer, Prokofiev might have turned to writing. He did write opera librettos, but the letters in this collection are especially revealing of the private man—a witty and ironic, though harsh, friend, a tireless worker, and an energetic man of business. Among those included in this selection of business letters (many about artistic collaborations), travel reports, and friendly notes are figures in the music world (Serge Koussevitsky, Nikolai Miaskovsky), the director Sergei Eisenstein, Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev, and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The list is a virtual who’s who of the Soviet artistic elite, and many letters shed light on the nature of Prokofiev’s artistry and his personality. Robinson, the author of a 1987 biography of the composer, also provides useful introductions to each chapter. His comments are unsentimental and even brutally candid. Describing the composer’s egotism and his mocking manner, he writes: —Empathy and compassion were never strong traits in Prokofiev’s character.— Robinson has published these letters in an effort to help save Prokofiev’s reputation from those (especially post—Cold War Russians) who condemn his —collaboration— with the Soviets. The letters, he argues, provide proof for his earlier claim that Prokofiev lacked political views. While they confirm that music was his raison d’àtre, they also indicate that, while Prokofiev chose to distance himself from politics, he was not ignorant of them. A valuable and accessible resource for musicologists, Soviet specialists, and those seeking greater insight into Prokofiev’s life and art. Readers should, however, make up their own minds about his politics.
Pub Date: May 29, 1998
ISBN: 1-55553-347-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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