Anecdotal and rarely modest, but denizens of Operaland will surely enjoy these tales of backstage pyrotechnics and intrigue.
From carpenter to general manager—the story of a 42-year climb up the ladder of the Met hierarchy by a man whose schooling ended early but whose education never ceased.
Volpe begins his tale with some family background and with Tom Sawyerish stories about playing hooky. He always preferred work to school and at 17 was already running his own Amoco station. By age 20, he was married (two other marriages would follow). In 1961, he began as a stagehand at the Morosco Theater (schlepping for shows by Kopit and Shaffer). On his first day at the Met (where he learned to build sets) he refused to fetch coffee for the veterans. And thus began the ascension. By 1966, he was the Met’s master carpenter. Volpe’s ad hoc account contains many stories about the personalities populating the Met’s stage and offices that will delight opera-lovers who like gossip and debate. Volpe loves James Levine but says the conductor eschews confrontation. The author fired Kathleen Battle when her vagaries and vicissitudes became impossible to endure. Rudolf Bing did not spend 5,000 nights at the opera, but he did have an “eye for a pretty dancer.” Volpe greatly admires director Franco Zeffirelli, though his sets sometimes needed some Volpean adjustment to work properly. One of Volpe’s predecessors, Hugh Southern, who lasted only seven months, was clueless, and head electrician Rudy Kuntner was “more of a diva than most divas.” Volpe chronicles his spats with colleagues and directors (especially Piero Faggioni) but has words of great praise and affection for Pavarotti and Domingo. Near the end, he offers his take on the controversial plans to renovate Lincoln Center.
Anecdotal and rarely modest, but denizens of Operaland will surely enjoy these tales of backstage pyrotechnics and intrigue.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26285-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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