A biography at once serious and entertaining, sensitive and critical: an unfailing joy to read.
A sensitive treatment of one of the best-loved musicians of a generation.
Burton (Leonard Bernstein, 1994) offers a readable, comprehensive examination of Menuhin’s path from child prodigy to international musical diplomat, drawing on the wealth of extant biographical material, press clippings, and statements issued by the artist himself to paint a dispassionate portrait of one of the most multifaceted and accomplished public figures of his century. Here, Menuhin is portrayed first as a music-loving, socially conscious child controlled by a manipulative mother and an ambitious father, and later as a philanthropic polymath, a lover of yoga and Indian music, a stubborn egalitarian as comfortable taking on the politics of the New York Philharmonic as the Soviet government. Still later he appearsas an impresario, conductor, the founder of a school, and a UNESCO diplomat. Burton’s rendering of Menuhin is bright, insightful, and at times enchantingly funny—as when the three Menuhin children play to a disbelieving would-be piano coach, who remarks in wonder, “Madame Menuhin’s womb is a veritable conservatoire.” He also demonstrates a deep respect for his subject, honoring what he describes as Menuhin’s good-natured acceptance of criticism by citing almost as many negative reviews of his work as positive, though one must assume that in actual fact the latter far outweighed the former. The only significant shortcoming of this otherwise delightful work is the absence of detail with regard to Menuhin’s personal relationships. There is little discussion of his four children or his younger sister, and as far as Menuhin’s two marriages are concerned, Burton supplies only the roughest of sketches. Nevertheless, the absence leaves the reader wanting to know more about Menuhin, not less. With each chapter, Burton does his readers a great service by providing recommendations for recordings to augment the reading experience.
A biography at once serious and entertaining, sensitive and critical: an unfailing joy to read.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001
ISBN: 1-55553-465-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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 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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