Of particular interest to specialists but written with an authority and passion that will appeal to general readers as well.
From music scholar and biographer Lockwood (Emeritus, Music/Harvard Univ.; Beethoven: The Music and the Life, 2002, etc.), a close examination of nine works at the heart of the Western classical tradition.
“For Beethoven, the symphony was a lifetime preoccupation,” writes the author, who draws on the composer’s detailed and comprehensive sketchbooks to trace the evolution of this preoccupation from the “supremely competent” First Symphony through “Ode to Joy,” the stunning choral finale to the Ninth. Acknowledging the profound musical influence of Haydn, Mozart, and (in later years) Bach, Lockwood also points to the wildly popular plays of Friedrich Schiller as inspirations for what Beethoven wished to achieve in his symphonies: “the ability to stir large audiences to emotional depths they had not experienced before.” The author’s technical analyses of such factors as key, tempo, and instrumentation are likely to daunt casual music lovers, but each chapter also contains eloquent summaries of each symphony’s impact on listeners, both at the time of its premiere and over the centuries, and of its place within Beethoven’s overall artistic development. The titanic nature of his ambitions, and the centrality of the symphony to them, is evident from the time of the Third Symphony, with which, Lockwood writes, Beethoven “lifted the genre of the symphony onto a new plane of expression and grandeur.” While the composer is perhaps best known for that grandeur and for such forceful moments as the famous four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony (“Thus Fate knocks at the door,” Beethoven is said to have remarked), the author also evinces and elicits appreciation for the quieter pleasures of the Fourth and the Sixth, or “Pastoral,” displaying the composer’s profound love for nature. The epilogue movingly affirms Beethoven’s symphonies as “exemplars of what great music can still mean in our fragmented and pessimistic age.”
Of particular interest to specialists but written with an authority and passion that will appeal to general readers as well.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-07644-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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