Kudos to the author for this deeply moving, outstanding biography.
A comprehensive, moving biography of arguably the world’s greatest and most well-known composer, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827).
For the many readers lacking the proper background in musical theory, British broadcaster and Beethoven authority Suchet’s explanations of Beethoven’s music sing to us almost as if we could hear it. Knowing of Beethoven’s deafness—his hearing began to deteriorate in his mid-20s—teaches us that the truly great can hear music in their brains. For the rest of us, we rely on exposure to the joy of hearing the music and the kindness of those who will explain it to us without impugning or offending our intelligence. To suggest that Beethoven was eccentric is being kind. He was unkempt to the point of slovenliness, and his unpredictable temperament and manic gestures and yelling during his walks were only accepted because of his well-known brilliance. At the same time, nothing impeded his creativity, as he produced some of his best work in times of war, ill health and extreme poverty. Only the years of legal battles over the guardianship of his nephew taxed his powers, a situation that was never really resolved, only postponed. Suchet examines Beethoven’s creative process over the years, especially in regard to the writing of his only opera, Fidelio, which premiered in 1805. The author’s moving description of the heart-rending melody in one of the legendary composer’s works brings us to a greater appreciation of the man: “It is a lift, marked sotto voce, which seems to take the soul with it. After a development, the first violin then falls a sixth. It is heartrending. When you believe Beethoven cannot increase the intensity any more, he writes pianissimo quavers for three strings, and then the first violin…weeps.” In the postscript, Suchet writes that “musicologists know where the source material is,” but he provides a brief list of recordings for curious lay readers.
Kudos to the author for this deeply moving, outstanding biography.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2206-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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