An epic pieced together with rare authenticity.
Carr (Mahler, 1997, etc.) captures a vast sweep of European history as he traces the lives of the legendary German composer and his heirs.
The term Wagnerian elicits a unique musical image of Teutonic vainglory, lust for power and passion that attended both the birth pangs of the modern German nation and its descent into Nazism. The author finds Richard Wagner (1813–83) a testament to genius unaccompanied by character. Wagner, Carr avers, managed to betray or double-cross nearly everyone he had dealings with of any kind, from “Mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria, a long-suffering patron, to his doting second wife Cosima, illegitimate daughter of the composer Franz Lizt. He published a personal diatribe on the Jewish threat to Europe, yet, notes Carr, this strident anti-Semite maintained personal relationships with Jews and treated them no worse than others. Hitler not only worshipped the composer’s music, he befriended Wagner’s family, especially his daughter-in-law Winifred. In March 1933, the Nazis organized a preposterously theatrical “Day of Potsdam” demonstration culminating with a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger that helped cement their electoral victory. Wagner’s martial airs underscored newsreels of German military attacks, and the funeral march from Gotterdammerung droned over Radio Berlin on the day Hitler died. The Bayreuth Festival, a cultural phenomenon since its opening in 1876, kept running all through World War II, thanks to Hitler’s patronage. But in 1945, the Wagner family, not to mention Germany itself, needed rehabilitation. Grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang eventually managed it, however. While Hitler had to pack the house with troops pulled from the frontlines, the typical applicant for Bayreuth tickets today, Carr notes, will spend a decade on the waiting list.
An epic pieced together with rare authenticity.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-975-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
