Self-indulgent ramblings that reveal more about the author than about her putative subject. Relentless pop-psych memoirist Chernin (A Different Kind of Listening, 1995, etc.) opens, fittingly enough, with a blow-by-blow account of her state of mind on Feb. 24, 1991, when she attended a concert at Berkeley given by a then-unknown 25-year-old Italian mezzo soprano. Chernin's devotees may be impressed with her vapid meandering (``I have taught myself not to expect too much from life, except where music is concerned''); those who picked up the book under the impression it was about Bartoli may feel some impatience. Breathless descriptions of Chernin's rapturous response to that and subsequent performances add nothing to our understanding of the singer best known for championing the neglected 18th-century repertoire and for zesty comic turns in Mozart and Rossini operas. An unintentionally hilarious chapter about a 1993 Chernin/Bartoli interview shows the artist politely answering questions on the order of ``Do you have a sense of carrying a sacred message?,'' while the author favors us with such portentous comments as ``With these words Cecilia Bartoli has taken on a strangely ageless quality.'' Coauthor Stendhal, identified only as Chernin's ``usual companion,'' provides some relief with a 70-page performance guide free from the bloated adjectives and trite theorizing of the previous 138 pages; her detailed, often shrewd analyses concentrate on what Bartoli actually did rather than her own reactions to it. But the book's overall tone is Chernin's. Anyone who believes with her that divas are intermediaries between the gods and the rest of us, or that opera inducts us into ``the secret emotional life of women'' (never mind that most of it was written by men) had better hope that these ideas find a more persuasive proponent next time around.
Pub Date: March 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018644-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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