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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
