Volume two of a contemporary monument in musical biography. More than twenty years ago de La Grange published the first volume (1973) of his life of composer/conductor Gustav Mahler. De La Grange proceeded through the first 40 years of Mahler's life, packed with creative work and emotional turmoil, on virtually a week-by-week (sometimes day-by-day) basis, claiming that the extraordinary length and detail of his book were necessitated by gaps in the written record occasioned by two world wars and the flux of national boundaries in Eastern Europe. The good news is that the second volume—which covers Mahler's legendary opera productions in Vienna, the anti-Semitism he battled against, his composition of the middle-period masterpieces, and his love affair with and marriage to Alma Schindler—is as good as, probably (by dint of the interest of its subject matter) better than, volume one. (The bad news is that this volume covers only the years between 1897 and 1904 in Vienna; volume three will complete the Vienna years, and volume four the New York years.) The approach is once again comprehensive. Thousands of letters, newspaper articles, and manuscript sources illuminate every corner of Mahler's life during the seven years in question. We are told the particulars of his favorite dessert and promised the recipe in an appendix to volume three. Nonetheless, such minutiae are not allowed to obscure the central fact that enabled Mahler to pursue his phenomenally challenging dual career as composer and conductor: his unshakable aesthetic. It is evident in every one of his many judgments and projects, extending from the largest compositional design to his informed rebuke of a tenor at the Vienna opera who was trying to worm out of singing Die Fledermaus on the grounds that light opera was ``beneath him.'' Against this artistic background, the complexity of Mahler's emotional life becomes easier to comprehend. A must-have for music libraries and all but the most superficial Mahler-ites.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-315159-6
Page Count: 1100
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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