An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.
An opera composer shares his love for “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form.”
Aucoin, a MacArthur fellow and the composer of operas about Walt Whitman and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, fell in love with the art form while growing up in suburban Boston during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this exceptional book, he describes what he calls opera’s impossibility, “the unattainability of its attempt to gather every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience.” He offers “a practitioner’s view” of opera in essays that “draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach.” His passion is evident in every chapter, starting with an introduction on opera’s basic ingredients, including “the most primal human needs: song and narrative.” From there, he offers learned readings of earlier works about the Orpheus myth; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas; and two contemporary operas that give him hope for the genre’s future: Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angeland Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber. Also included are chapters on the inspirations for his own operas, including Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries and the Eurydice play by Sarah Ruhl that “retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through the eyes of its heroine.” Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating, as when he approvingly notes W.H. Auden’s “ready-for-RuPaul’s-Drag-Race affronts to good taste” in his libretto for The Rake’s Progressor when he writes that Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfershas harmonies that “might have struck a seventeenth-century audience as twangingly dissonant, but to modern ears the whole thing sounds positively groovy…the Beach Boys on the shores of Hell.” The author is often clever, as when he justifies barely mentioning Wagner in this book: “That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere.”
An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-17538-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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