Bernstein emerges as highly literate, compassionate, astonishingly busy and gifted almost beyond measure.
Nearly 60 years of revealing letters to and from the composer of West Side Story, a musical colossus who stood with one foot on Broadway, the other in whatever of the world’s symphony halls he wished.
Meticulously and even lovingly edited and annotated by Simeone, the author of Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story (2009), the volume begins in 1932 with a letter from the 14-year-old to his piano teacher, Helen Coates, who reappears throughout. Simeone does not reproduce every letter here (he focuses principally on Bernstein’s musical life), but even so, Bernstein’s list of correspondents is a virtual who’s who: Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Judy Holliday, Randall Thompson, Jerome Robbins, Bette Davis, Farley Granger (with whom he apparently had a fling), Lena Horne, James M. Cain, Martha Gellhorn, Arthur Miller, Aldous Huxley, Cole Porter, a 10-year-old Yo-Yo Ma, Thornton Wilder, and on and on. There’s also a touching late-life letter from Miles Davis, who wrote, “You are one of America’s true geniuses.” Indeed, Simeone also focuses—though softly—on Bernstein’s sexual identity (his wife was well-aware of his homosexuality) and includes a few letters mentioning the births of his children (much more appears in the footnotes). Bernstein was generally exuberant in his letters, reporting his podium successes around the world with great panache. He encouraged other musicians, was grateful for those who had helped him, and was generous to his collaborators. He and Robbins admit towering admiration for each other—though recognizing, as well, how they got on the other’s nerves. Simeone’s notes are numerous and thorough, and the letters become weighty with poignant and wrenching dramatic irony as we recognize the end nearing.
Bernstein emerges as highly literate, compassionate, astonishingly busy and gifted almost beyond measure.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-17909-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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