That this biographical study of composer, polymath, and activist Lou Harrison began as an oral history explains a lot; its cozy tone betrays long exposure not only to octogenarian Harrison himself, but also the dizzying orbit of progressive artists, musical and otherwise, with whom he has come into contact over a long and diverse career. The authors, a musicologist/performer and ethnomusicologist/composer, respectively, do bring marked insight to the occasionally bewildering universe Harrison inhabits, devoting separate chapters to their subject’s researches into, and utilizations of, tonality, instrumentation, and tuning, among other nuts and bolts of musical process that this composer has drastically reconsidered. Harrison’s complex relationship with East Asian music is likewise treated at length, with particular emphasis on his works written for gamelan, of which the variable intonation would become for him a source of fascinated inspiration. With respect to extramusical issues—essential where Harrison is concerned—the authors weave the voices of their many sources to fine effect, finding continuity in his travails and accomplishments on both coasts and exploring the composer’s crucial decision to return to a culturally (and sexually) vibrant California in 1953. The freedoms he encountered there are not only to be found in Harrison’s music—they include a surprisingly sober chapter decoding gay “markers” in his oeuvre—but are evinced, the authors would seem to inply, in the very ubiquity of the music itself. If, then, one can move below the current of obsequy that runs throughout the book, there is much strong scholarship to be found; the authors— appreciation of the many formal risks that underlie Harrison’s eclecticism, as of the deep humanity that drives it, allows for an unusually clear portrait of an artist whose restless pursuit of beauty has driven him from medium to medium, most often beyond the public eye. (20 b&w illustrations, not seen; CD included)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-19-511022-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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