The only book on Beethoven most music lovers will need.
An outstanding new survey of the great composer’s life and works, marred slightly by gimmickry.
Lockwood (Music Emeritus/Harvard) does a superb job synthesizing the painful details of Beethoven’s tortured existence (1770–1827) with the genius of his compositions. His loving mother died while he was a teenager, and his alcoholic father was only interested in promoting his son as the “second Mozart.” Fortunately, this did not preclude Beethoven’s obtaining a first-class musical education. He was also fortunate to grow up in late-18th-century Bonn, which possessed a rich and varied musical culture from which he absorbed much. Thus, when the young man arrived in Vienna to study with Haydn and seek his fortune, he was fully formed as a musician and quickly rose to fame. While there are no startling new revelations here, Lockwood benefits from and integrates well the increasingly available information from Beethoven’s voluminous diaries, sketchbooks, and conversation books, which vividly place the reader at the scene. (See, for example, the deeply moving description of the celebrated “Heiligenstadt Testament” and the composer’s agony over his increasing deafness.) At the same time, Lockwood is skeptical of and careful to avoid contemporary biographers’ readiness to offer up inane circumstantial explanations of compositional idioms. The one disappointment here is the omission of music examples in the text in favor of posting them on a dedicated Web site (not in operation at the time of this writing). This seems a cumbersome substitute for having the notes on the same page as the analysis. It will make no difference to those who don’t read music, of course, but to those who can, it is the equivalent of reading a book about physics with all the math left out. Strongly compensating, however, is Lockwood’s remarkable ability to describe music in words.
The only book on Beethoven most music lovers will need.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05081-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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