Rich with wit and warmth, this compact biography is thoroughly enchanting.
An ideal introduction to understanding the famous composer.
A British broadcaster and renowned Beethoven expert, Suchet (The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna, 2016, etc.) is a terrific guide for general readers to delve into the life, art, and times of the great composer. It’s like attending a lively, entertaining, and informative lecture, with a slide show of illustrations going by in the background: here’s Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) as a young boy (Wolferl to his family), mischievously smiling, here’s the 16-year-old Beethoven playing the piano for the 31-year-old Mozart, who later said, “watch out for that boy; one day he will give the world something to talk about.” Suchet’s aim is to truly “reveal the man,” warts and all. Leopold, his always difficult, domineering father, saw the genius early on when, at age 3, Mozart could replicate what his talented older sister Nannerl was playing at the clavichord. He was soon playing the instrument (blindfolded, later), composing music, and teaching himself the violin. Leopold immediately saw a moneymaking opportunity and took both on a rigorous road tour, the first of many. Mozart was 6. Suchet notes that no “other composer travelled as much as Mozart.” Overall, it was 3,720 days, nearly one-third of his life. He never attended school, was forever on display, and was often ill. He worked constantly at composing, which was “as natural as breathing.” The author draws extensively on the many surviving letters to help fashion his discerning portrait of an often witty and happy genius who also delighted in the scatological. He lightly touches on many of Mozart’s compositions with just the right amount of analysis and opinion. The Marriage of Figaro “would change the face of opera.” Don Giovanni was his “finest, most complex, most dramatically and musically perfect opera.” Jupiter, Mozart’s final piece, written “with unhappiness around him,” is “indisputably his greatest symphony.”
Rich with wit and warmth, this compact biography is thoroughly enchanting.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-509-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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