As pleasurable as hearing Britten’s music for the first time: familiar, but new and rich enough to keep you coming back.
A probing inquiry into Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), one of England’s greatest modern composers, as well as a survey of mid-20th-century provincial England.
Powell (Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, 2009, etc.) embraces all that was mundane, traditional and familiar to his subject, intentionally interrogating the quotidian relationships, patterns and social norms that informed his creative development. At times, the narrative reads with the comfort of the tried-and-true English cozy, minus the murders. Nevertheless, it is precisely Powell’s focus on Britten’s daily “Englishness” that is the book’s greatest strength. While other authors have focused on Britten’s cosmopolitan contacts and his place within a larger English musical historiography, Powell’s approach allows for readers to understand Britten on his own terms first, terms informed by Britten’s familial relationships, pronounced musical tastes and loyalty to his early musical mentor, Frank Bridge. Inasmuch as Powell’s biography provides many new insights into Britten’s world, it is perhaps the detailed accounts of the relationships between Britten and other important, but underexposed composers that provides the freshest and arguably most useful information. Otherwise little-known bits about John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Thomas Beecham migrate from Britten’s diaries into Powell’s text, often accompanied by Powell’s insightful analysis. The same can be said for the author’s well-crafted discussion of Britten’s close working and personal relationship with W.H. Auden, a relationship otherwise thoroughly examined by past biographers. Although Powell’s conclusions about everything from Britten’s sexual relationships to his interest in particular musical forms occasionally overreach, they at least beg new questions. With Britten’s centennial year quickly approaching, new questions are greatly welcome.
As pleasurable as hearing Britten’s music for the first time: familiar, but new and rich enough to keep you coming back.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9774-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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