by Max Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2001
Unlike his high-minded heroine, Phillips (Snakebite Sonnet, 1998) scrupulously avoids any worship at the shrine of art: the...
An inventive, vividly written fictional autobiography of Alma Mahler (1879–1964).
The full-figured blond beauty of Fräulein Alma Schindler, daughter of a famous landscape painter, is much admired in Vienna’s musical and artistic circles. When partial deafness ends her plan to become an opera singer, she turns to composing, while also daydreaming about marrying “the way that you might stand above a ravine and imagine yourself falling.” She’s set her heart on an artist, provided she can find one who’s pure, brave, and manly enough to dominate her. Starting with painter Gustav Klimt—a talented peasant, but still a peasant, according to her outraged family—she trifles with one man after another, finally choosing composer/conductor Gustav Mahler. Jewish-born Catholic convert Mahler can’t resist this self-styled Aryan goddess of love, who nurtures his genius and inspires his greatest music. But after the birth of their first daughter, Maria, the role of muse begins to wear thin; soon pregnant again, Alma feels she’s turning into a doughty housekeeper. When Maria dies of diphtheria, the grieving family sets sail for America, where Mahler triumphs, then sickens of heart disease. Later, while taking the waters at an Austrian spa, the couple meets a young architect, Walter Gropius, who falls immediately in love with Alma. But he won’t marry her after the great man dies, and so she begins an affair with Czech expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka—a liaison that ends badly. Years afterward, she marries Gropius, by then busy inventing the Bauhaus movement. Moving right along, she eventually leaves him for another Jew who can’t resist her: popular Austrian author Franz Werfel. The two narrowly escape the Holocaust and wind up in Hollywood, along with other famous European ex-pats. Franz dies, and Alma lives on 20 years more, old and fat and ultimately disappointed, even by her own death.
Unlike his high-minded heroine, Phillips (Snakebite Sonnet, 1998) scrupulously avoids any worship at the shrine of art: the result, thankfully, is highly entertaining.Pub Date: June 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6670-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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by Max Phillips
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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