From the golden boy knocking out songs in 15 minutes to the dying old man who kept working because it was the core of his...
From veteran biographer Secrest (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992, etc.), a serviceable portrait of the composer who was half of two of the American musical’s greatest teams.
Richard Rodgers (1902–79) played the piano by ear before he was in grade school, and in a Manhattan household filled with tense silences, music was the bond that knit together his cultivated Jewish family. When he was not yet 17, he teamed up with Lorenz Hart, whose tough, witty lyrics matched Rodgers’s warm, sparkling music to energize musical comedy in the 1920s and ’30s (A Connecticut Yankee, The Boys from Syracuse). Rodgers enjoyed a cushy, glamorous existence managed capably by his wife Dorothy, who tolerated his casual infidelities as the price for running all other aspects of their life. In the early ’40s, Rodgers finally split with the alcoholic and self-destructive Hart and joined Oscar Hammerstein to reach even greater commercial success with more serious (and often more sentimental) and carefully integrated musical plays. Secrest finds nothing new to say (understandably) about the revolutionary impact of Oklahoma! in 1943, but her work on Leonard Bernstein (1994) and Stephen Sondheim (1998) shows as she places Rodgers and Hammerstein within the context of American theater history, though tending to quote better-credentialed critics rather than offering her own opinions of shows like Carousel, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Making use of interviews with and memoirs by Rodgers’s family, friends, and colleagues, she limns a paradoxical personality: witty, gregarious, charming with professional contacts; yet frequently cold and critical, if not downright hostile, with wife and daughters.
From the golden boy knocking out songs in 15 minutes to the dying old man who kept working because it was the core of his being, Secrest is vivid in conveying Rodgers’s presence and his effect on those around him. If the wellsprings that powered his greatest songs remain mysterious, he might have preferred it that way.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40164-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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