by Matthew Boyden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 1999
An unflattering portrait of Germany’s most popular modern classical composer, mitigated by hearty appreciation for his musical genius. Richard Strauss (1864—1949) aspired to follow in the mighty footsteps of Beethoven and Wagner, and this forthright promoter of “New German” music certainly equaled the former in arrogance and the latter in distasteful (though decidedly intermittent) anti-Semitism. Best known today for the opening chords of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (brilliant or bombastic, depending on whom you ask) and several of the very few canonical 20th-century operas (most notably Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne auf Naxos), Strauss won fame early as a conductor as well as a composer; English music producer and editor Boyden offers an especially juicy depiction of the rancid infighting in Greater Germany’s musical capitals, from Berlin to Vienna, where the young artist made his name while undercutting ostensible friends like Gustav Mahler. The author also convincingly argues that, despite his reputation for shocking subjects and aggressively “modern” scores, Strauss was in fact the last of the 19th-century romantics, “an end, not a beginning” (though Boyden also makes a nice case for Rosenkavalier and Ariadne as postmodern works of pastiche and irony). Strauss emerges in this biography as self-absorbed and selfish, the musician-as-businessman more concerned with success than artistic integrity, unable to understand those less effortlessly populist than he. His collaboration with the Nazis, to whom he handed priceless propaganda opportunities by remaining in Germany and even substituting for conductors dismissed for political reasons, is evaluated by Boyden as more a matter of willed blindness than active evil, but nonetheless shameful. Although the author retains his admiration for Strauss as “one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music,” his solid but not especially vivid descriptions of the music may not convince all readers of this claim’s justice. Judicious, well-balanced, and thoughtfully argued, though its readability would be enhanced by a little more passion either for or against the unpleasant Herr Strauss. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1999
ISBN: 1-55553-418-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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