A stellar work of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics.
A captivating group biography of four impressive British women composers.
In her first book, a vibrant narrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do. Each of her subjects wrote “exquisite, breathtaking music” and achieved “extraordinary” things. Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) is first. A rebellious, eccentric suffragette—she wrote the anthem “The March of the Women” in 1910—she is the “grande dame” of the book. Openly queer, she was a trailblazer for female conductors and composers. “When composing under the immediate influence of a muse,” writes Broad, “Ethel could write music that was both bold and intimate, sprightly and humorous, and always with a driving energy that stunned her listeners.” Her vast body of work would inspire others, including Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). A viola virtuoso, she spent much of her life in America, eventually settling there. Unlike Smyth’s initial pieces, Clarke’s first musical compositions were far more accepted and celebrated. In 1913, she was “one of only six women to play in the string section of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra—the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra.” Conservative and quiet, Dorothy Gertrude Howell (1898-1982) bonded with Smyth, and they “became threads in the rich tapestry of each other’s lives.” The “crunchy chords” in her early pieces, Broad writes, would become the “searing, intense, uncomfortable discords that make her later works so powerful.” Her 1919 symphonic poem, Lamia, was a huge success. Finally, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003) lived a complex life in the shadows. A star at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied piano and composition, she received a scholarship to score films and went on to become one of the first women to have a career as a film composer. Her affair and later marriage to the popular, married composer William Alwyn resulted in what Broad calls the “familiar” story: a woman’s work subsumed by the man’s.
A stellar work of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780571366101
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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