A decent, thoughtful, and idealistic biography of American music's radical idealist. Judged by the first criterion of musical biography—does it make us want to listen to the music?—this portrait of ``Charlie'' Ives must be counted a success. Yankee bandmaster's son, Yalie, rebel modernist, insurance executive, and Romantic visionary who spent the last quarter-century of his life retouching a ``Universe'' symphony that was never completed to his satisfaction: The outline of the story is familiar to readers with a general interest in 20th-century American music. Swafford's personal slant is frankly to admit his own sympathy with the social progressivism that underlay Ives's approach to both his art and his go-getting business career. Unlike the psychobiographers who have been attracted to Ives (see Stuart Feder's Charles Ives, ``My Father's Song''), Swafford has no interest in probing Ives's weaknesses. He is receptive to, rather than critical of, the expansive, can-do, ``universalist individualism''—a legacy from the 19th-century Transcendentalists whom Ives ``portrayed'' in the Concord Sonata- -which shaped Ives's beliefs about family, marriage, career, and artistic output. Since the author owns to this empathetic approach to his subject, the reader is readier to pardon the occasional gushing quality of Swafford's prose and some questionable, frankly subjective music judgements (e.g., The Unanswered Question is not a work of Ives's musical maturity). To his credit, Swafford has done a good job of setting out the gratifying story of how Ives's music was championed and actively promoted by other composers and musical leaders, including Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Leonard Bernstein, and Leopold Stokowski. A conscientious, intellectually honest sifting of the plentiful evidence, though undoubtedly not the last word on its subject.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03893-9
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
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