A useful reference tool, somewhat marred by the author's zeal to make everyone a Mahler maniac. Some biographers scribe the life of their subject and let the reader decide whether the subject was Satan or saint. Others can't resist luring the reader to their point of view. Carr, a former correspondent for the Financial Times and the Economist (Helmut Schmidt, 1985, etc.), falls in the latter category in a biography of Gustav Mahler (18601911) that openly tries to ``correct'' other histories of the famous composer/conductor. Of Mahler's oft-described ``reign of terror'' as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic—he replaced about 80 instrumentalists, including more than 30 wind players, in his decade at the podium- -Carr notes, ``Mahler surely acted not from spite but from the highest artistic motives.'' Mahler's wife, Alma Schindler, meanwhile, is portrayed as a selfish, manipulative woman whose memoirs, long a primary basis on which history has judged Mahler, are according to Carr filled with errors and attempts to make herself look better. Using letters, diaries, and other materials not previously available in English, Carr repeatedly debunks Alma's claims about Mahler and their relationship. He quotes, for instance, her editing of Mahler's letters to her. A letter from Mahler that asked Alma to ``answer . . . if you are able to follow me'' was amended in Alma's memoirs to read ``answer . . . if you are willing to follow me.'' While Alma's apparent misperceptions are probably worthy of correction, the lack of objectivity by the author is so blatant at times, it makes the reader doubt other valid points he tries to make. The book, however, is not without interesting revelations. Carr's analyses of Mahler's symphonies, both in their relationships to one another and to his various philosophies, are unique and stimulating. Classical music aficionados either love Mahler or they don't. Those who read this biography will likely fall into similar camps. (35 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-87951-802-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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