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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
