Style notwithstanding, any visitor to Paris with an interest in music will find this guide indispensable.
An interesting and useful guide, written in a competent, but dry style.
By the reign of Louis-Phillipe, Paris was Europe's cultural capital and, like Vienna, attracted many of the greatest musicians and composers of the era. While much has been written of the musical scene in Vienna at the time, much less has been written about Paris, and Simeone, a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Wales, attempts to fill the gap with a well researched and comprehensive Baedeker of the city's musical scene. It includes biographies of the major composers who made Paris their home, the addresses, locations of their graves (if in Paris), and listings of all important musical locales, arranged by arrondissement and street, along with the nearest Métro stops. Also found are four walking tours and copious photographs, contemporary and historic. Simeone gives us small details that add pleasure and interest (e.g., composer Marcel Dupré, organist at Saint-Sulpice for 65 years, was also the organist at the wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson). Of Joseph Canteloube, arranger of the celebrated Chants d'Auvergne, Simeone writes, `During the early 1920s he made several pioneering music broadcasts for French radio. . . . The first of these [on Scarlatti] was broadcast on 28 January 1924 under difficult circumstances: rain was leaking through the studio roof, and an assistant had to hold an umbrella over Canteloube as he played.` Simeone is a genuine scholar of both music and Paris and he has thoroughly researched both subjects. Just the same, our pleasure would be enhanced if Simeone had been able to write in a livelier style. While his writing is clear and factual, it seldom rises above the expository. Rife with information, it is a pity that a book on such a rich topic should be written in the arid manner of a college textbook on macroeconomics.
Style notwithstanding, any visitor to Paris with an interest in music will find this guide indispensable.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08053-0
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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