A marvelous celebration of the life and career of the brilliant American soprano, incorporating interviews with the singer (who died in 1981) as well as the recollections of people who worked with her and for her, of family members, and of artistic colleagues. Each chapter of interviews is followed by a comprehensive documentary section drawn from such items as letters by Ponselle and reviews of her performances. The result is a fascinating, complex, and convincing portrait of a remarkable woman. Rosa Ponselle was born in 1897, in Meriden, Conn., to Italian immigrants. She studied music with her mother, and with her sister Carmilla formed the Italian Girls, a successful vaudeville act that eventually took them to New York, where they shared the bill with such luminaries as Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, and the Astaires. Caruso heard her sing, and the rest is history: In 1919 she became an overnight star at the Metropolitan Opera, and for roughly 20 years she was the American prima diva, a tempestuous star not just of opera, but the concert stage, radio, and recordings. She made her last appearence at the Met in 1937, after some 365 performances; she was, she tells Drake, ``tired of the grind.'' She spent the rest of her long life as a society hostess, usually living alone (her one marriage didn't last long). We know her through her recordings, most of which she condemns as ruined by ``that damned clock'' (i.e., the need to fit a performance within the confines of a 78 rpm recording, which drove singers to sing faster and louder, sacrificing nuance and contrast). Some of her recordings, such as the two arias from Vestale made in 1926, are classics. Her recollections of fellow perforers are frank, vivid and perceptive. Ponselle's husband remembered her as ``alluring, bright, shrewd . . . sometimes just impossible.'' Drake's splendid book gives us the full measure of her—both as diva and vaudeville star turned society hostess and self-exiled recluse. (63 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57467-019-0
Page Count: 536
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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