This monument of research—a lifetime's labor of love—now becomes the standard scholarly biography of Giuseppe Verdi in English. For four decades, Phillips-Matz has immersed herself in the archives not only of the Verdi family but of parish churches, town halls, publishing companies, and opera houses throughout Europe. Her method is one of extensive factual presentation rather than portraiture, and the density of her research is likely to prove daunting to casual readers (for the nonspecialist, George Martin's Verdi, 1963, remains a first choice). Nonetheless, Phillips-Matz's fact-gathering allows intelligent readers to form their own views, and it clarifies the distortions Verdi himself created. Phillips- Matz makes a convincing case that Verdi's background and childhood weren't as obscure and poverty-stricken as he led his contemporaries to believe. In addition, although Phillips-Matz largely leaves musical and dramatic analysis of the operas to others, her investigation of Verdi's relationships—with his family, his first wife (who died, as did their two children, while Verdi was still young), and the woman with whom he lived openly for a number of years before she became his second wife—will ring bells for those familiar with the family complications that fill the plots of Verdi's operas. The author is also first-rate at explicating the sources of the composer's anticlericalism and fierce patriotism to a united Italy. Readers of the magazine Opera are already familiar with the controversy that Phillips-Matz has engendered by suggesting that a baby girl named ``Santa Streppini,'' who was abandoned to be raised by nuns in Cremona, may have been Verdi's illegitimate daughter. Her argument is not unconvincing on the facts but is less convincing as a matter of human nature given the ``Bear of Busseto's'' well-documented scorn for public opinion. To a shelf of CDs and Julian Budden's magisterial three-volume musico-dramatic analysis of the operas, the complete Verdian now must add this book. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-313204-4
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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 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
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