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
A moving yet muddled personal story.
This debut volume of a mother’s memoir recounts her experience of turning to God for solace in grieving the death of her two-year-old son.
Beginning with her adolescence and moving forward to her son’s untimely death from complications relating to influenza, Taylor writes of her lifelong curiosity about death and the role that God plays in it. After the tragedy in her family, both issues intensified to a point of obsession for the author. At its heart, this story is as compelling, difficult and rewarding as any great personal memoir. Written long after the tragedy of her son’s death, Taylor views the events and circumstances of her life and that time with the practicality necessary to prevent the narrative from slipping into an eyeless, self-indulgent mess. The problem is that Taylor places this sensible approach in a much larger scope. In the introduction, she makes clear that the entirety of the book hinges on God and how He affects our ideas of life and death. This is a fine foundation for this type of memoir, but the author is too hesitant to truly sell the idea, probably because of her difficult experiences with “death in the family” books after her son’s passing. Taylor leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between God and mortality, which comes across as alarmingly indecisive for a woman who intends to focus dutifully on that exact relationship. While it’s refreshing to see such a devout woman allow others their opinions, the author could have made her points more forcefully. However, even with this shortcoming, she tells the story of her emotional survival after her son’s death with a confiding gusto that avoids bleak self-pity, becoming palatable and mature.
A moving yet muddled personal story.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-2848-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feinberg's reflections on AIDS are often annoying and mediocre, frequently witty, and sometimes deeply disturbing. Novelist Feinberg (Eighty-Sixed, 1989) starts out unpromisingly. The first and title essay of the collection is burdened by zeitgeist clichÇs (e.g., ``I plead the Twinkie defense''), patronizing scorn for the reader's supposed ``bleeding liberal heart,'' overuse of italics for emphasis, and insights more appropriate to a T-shirt than an essay (``Reality is for people who can't cope with drugs''). After that piece, though, the writing picks up. With dark humor and rage, Feinberg brings us to ACT UP meetings and demonstrations and recounts the deaths, funerals, and memorial services of his friends. He also chronicles his own physical decay in unsparing detail; some of these sections are so visceral that they are hard to read. In lighter moments, he reflects on red ribbons, the gym, and the etiquette of HIV disclosure. Though Feinberg's humor can fall flat, most of the essays have their moments: At one point he muses, ``Gays call straights breeders...I'm sure we'll come up with a derogatory term for neggies [HIV-negative people] soon enough: Aseptic? Hermetically sealed?'' His rudeness can be delightful; on a bus, he tells some young people pondering the meaning of life to keep it down, ``because some of us are thirty and we have already had these conversations.'' Sometimes his campy, flippant style seems trivializing, but it can be highly appropriate, as when he exposes the cynical selling of AIDS, from criminally insensitive direct- mail campaigns for AIDS organizations (one group's letter begins ``Before he died, he asked me to mail this to you'') to LifeStyle Urns (cremation urns marketed specifically to people with AIDS and their survivors—some even come engraved with a lambda symbol). Despite this collection's title, Feinberg is no Hunter S. Thompson, but he does have an effective, biting edge.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85766-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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