Finally, a Mozart biography that evokes a believable portrait of a striving, powerfully creative human being. Solomon, author of the ground-breaking life of Beethoven (1977), now turns his attention to the ``miracle which God let be born in Salzburg.'' The result is magisterial. Solomon's overriding ambition is to dismember what he calls the ``Myth of [Mozart] the Eternal Child,'' a view of the composer as a divinely inspired perpetual adolescent. The myth had its unseemly origins in the efforts of Mozart's father, Leopold, to keep his fiercely talented son subservient. By contrast, as laid out in Solomon's thoughtful, dignified and always readable narrative, one comes to appreciate that Mozart—despite numerous personal struggles and pervasive familial and societal restraints—had achieved a dramatic psychological as well as artistic maturity by the time of his death at age 35. Solomon's own ground rules are those of Freudian orthodoxy; not every reader will agree with every one of his interpretations. Still, the known facts are presented so clearly, and Solomon's analytic bias is so overt, that even a less than critical reader is in no risk of being misled. It also must be admitted that the lives of few other artists present so much material that feels right at home on the analytic couch. Mozart's father was the most successful imaginable musical pedagogue and impresario for his son; he was also a self-deceiving, self- defeating paranoid whose exploitation of both his children's phenomenal abilities feels, to a modern sensibility, perilously close to child abuse. Mozart grew from the devoted prodigy to the prolific and consummate craftsman (and, in Solomon's view, more of a musical radical than conventional musical history has been willing to allow), as well as a sometimes agonized husband and father and an emblematic member of a rapidly changing society. How he did so forms the matter of Solomon's work. A splendid book with ramifications for the whole study of Western culture, not just classical music.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-019046-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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
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