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 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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