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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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