A music historian’s (Univ. of Houston) biography of the man who, despite sectarian assaults from the academy, is still regarded as America’s greatest composer. Modern biographers appear to feel obliged to write works that weigh in at several pounds; but, length notwithstanding, Pollack’s book is remarkably taut and clear. Extensive musical analyses, though with minimal technical jargon, replace the meal inventories and party rosters that usually document life’s less dramatic stretches and, given the breadth and diversity of Copland’s (1900—90) work, prove both welcome and diverting. But more original is the narrative design. Rather than simply stringing together what he considers telling episodes, Pollack sounds a theme as it occurs chronologically—political affiliations, professional relationships, personal finances—and then offers a summary of its development and variation across a lifetime. The effect is of parallel expositions that create a superstructure only gradually filled in. New events enter into existing contexts, seeming to assume their prescribed places rather than accreting randomly. Pollack sketches character in the same way, presenting a series of sometimes conflicting accounts from friends and rivals, all meticulously footnoted, and then allowing the reader to judge new disclosures of fact accordingly. He appears to have no psychoanalytic theory about Copland—a leftist Brooklyn Jew who came to grips with his homosexuality in the 1920s—which is a welcome relief. Perhaps his even-handedness and circumspection derive from his subject, a paragon of self-control in an environment uniquely hospitable to self-indulgence. Still, such creditable objectivity, even in describing the aesthetic rigor that, combined with Copland’s compulsive honesty, could disgruntle colleagues, can—t help but stir affection for the man who did more than any other to build a uniquely American musical culture. Not only a success in its own right, but a valuable model of what biography can and probably should be.
Pub Date: March 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-4909-6
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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 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
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