A thorough if dry biography published in the centennial year of the great soprano's birth. There are two ways of writing biography: Creating a portrait—novelized nonfiction, if you will—or presenting an incredibly detailed and more distanced account of a life. Phillips-Matz (Verdi, 1993), a regular contributor to Opera News and a former manager of the Spoleto Festival, has chosen the latter strategy here; the results are both good and not-so. Reading at times like a grocery list as the author strings together quotes from reviews and other sources, this volume about one of the 20th century's great singers is nonetheless impressive for the depth of its research. In ably charting Ponselle's life, Phillips-Matz relies on extensive interviews (conducted by both herself and others) as well as on a great deal of documentary material. Born in Meriden, Conn., in 1897, Ponselle rose from her modest origins as a sixth-grade drop-out who traveled the vaudeville circuit as one half of a singing duo with her sister, Carmela. Later, with the assistance of star tenor Enrico Caruso, she made her fairy-tale-style Metropolitan Opera debut at the age of 21. Ponselle was an unpredictable character, given to practical jokes and sports. This was a woman who spent her vacations not only learning every note of the new operas she was scheduled to sing the following season, but also mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps, and biking and fishing wherever. Her star status is all the more striking considering that she didn't come to opera training until fairly late. Aspiring opera singers will appreciate the author's attention to Ponselle's habits and singing strategies, while lay fans will value the book's indefatigable flow of information. Included are a Ponselle discography and a foreword by Beverly Sills. A rather conventional approach to a fairly unconventional life. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55553-317-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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