Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed...
A thorough, affectionate and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).
Swafford (Music History, Theory and Composition, Boston Conservatory; Johannes Brahms: A Biography, 1997, etc.) brings a lifetime of study and passion to this remarkable work. Rich in biographical detail, the volume contains revealing excerpts from many of Beethoven’s letters and from the written observations of his visitors and family; it also contains detailed analyses of many of his most notable works, analyses that will no doubt puzzle readers unversed in music theory and/or unable to read music (Swafford includes numerous examples from the composer’s scores). Although the music remains prominent here, Beethoven’s life and personality are also downstage. We learn about his contentious relationships with his family—especially with his nephew Karl, whom Beethoven took into his home when the composer’s brother Carl died. Rigorous and unyielding, Beethoven had a difficult time with the young man, who eventually learned to play his uncle artfully. We also see Beethoven’s enormous talent at the piano, an instrument on which he could endlessly improvise—and an instrument he had to gradually surrender as his hearing worsened. We see the composer, too, as a homely man (his face scarred), often slovenly in his appearance and personal habits, an extremely proud man who considered himself the equal of all, a man who had a horrible time managing money and who never did find a woman who would accept him. (He invariably chose far younger women or women above his social standing.) Swafford highlights Beethoven’s ferocious work ethic and his emergence from the substantial shadows of Haydn and Bach (he failed to acknowledge the influence of the former until Haydn’s death).
Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-618-05474-9
Page Count: 1088
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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