Even those who know classical music well will learn something from this lively and enthusiastic primer.
A warm introduction to the world of classical music.
Mauceri (Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting, 2017), who has won a Grammy, a Tony, and three Emmys, invites us into his beloved world of music. Aimed at novices, his book “attempts to sum up a lifetime of feelings” about classical music, which “contains within its two words an immensely varied cache of organized sound.” The author’s joy for music is infectious. He wants to share the love of classical music he first discovered in 1956 as a 10-year-old listening to the “cosmic power” of Beethoven’s Eroica for the first time on a TV show. Beethoven’s “nine symphonies,” he writes, “constitute the greatest sequence of symphonies ever composed.” Classical music began with the “towering achievements” of Bach, the “divinely inspired architect,” and Handel, the “great cosmopolitan entertainer,” both born in 1685. More talented Germans, including Hayden and Schubert, followed. After a concise chronological history of musical instruments, from the winds to percussion, bells and cymbals, the keyboard, shaped for the human hand, and the strings, Mauceri explores the nature and structure of music as metaphor and the process of listening: “The audience is always the ultimate translator of music.” Within the subjective territory of music and morality, he argues that classical music can “make us better.” It’s a “force of good” and “projects optimism.” Kenneth Clark had his art and architecture, but Mauceri writes that classical music “stands as the pillar of who we are as a civilization.” The last chapter confronts diversity in classical music, and historically, the author admits, it has come up wanting. However, “gender and racial balance within orchestras has significantly improved,” and Mauceri notes the number of black and non-European conductors who “broke racial barriers” in recent years.
Even those who know classical music well will learn something from this lively and enthusiastic primer.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52065-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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