One of the three best books on the voice of Maria Callas, following John Ardoin's The Callas Legacy (1977) and Michael Scott's Maria Meneghini Callas (1992). German journalist Kesting makes no effort to spell out yet again sensational incidents from Callas's life (1923-77), and indeed seems to have done little original research or interviewing for the life side of his study. His is largely an aesthetic biography, offering a chronological overview of the diva's vocal and dramatic abilities, and exploring the influence on her vocalizing of her teachers, conductors, and rivals. Kesting attends closely to Callas's recording career, both in performance and in the studio, noting the scaled-down voice in the studio recordings, where Callas didn't have to project to fill an opera house. The author makes clear how the earliest recordings astound with their bare-nerved electricity, fullness, freshness, and devil-may-care agility. Callas had the briefest career of any of the century's major sopranos, with only a 12-year span in which she was in fearless top-voice as she brought new dramatic meaning to bel canto roles that before her had fallen into a meaningless babble of pretty note-spinning. The young diva amazed audiences by taking on heavy roles—such as Isolde and Turandot—and then, days after, performing exquisitely energized bel canto roles. Callas's decline, Kesting shows, came about as fame drew her into the glitterati, and scandal, exhaustion, and her nerves dried up her voice. Insightful, but not light reading: best for the confirmed opera/Callas fan. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55553-179-2
Page Count: 456
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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