A breezy, charming walk through the life one of France's most renowned opera singers. Crespin opens her memoir with a bedtime recollection of her Italian grandmother, Mannolini, the person who taught her to love singing. It is an intimate, small moment, the kind of tidbit more likely to be revealed in a gossipy chat with a good friend on a front porch than in a book. It lends a reader-friendly tone that Crespin maintains throughout, making the famous soprano's memoir a light but interesting read. Refreshingly unaffected, Crespin writes honestly of her unhappy childhood with an alcoholic mother and Draconian father, the sexual problems of her first marriage, an abortion and her sadness at never bearing a child, her fear when battling breast cancer, and the mental and emotional problems that once threatened to end her singing career. Crespin is not one to wallow in self-pity, though. The only really bitter moment comes when she writes of the lack of acclaim and recognition she has received in her native France, where she still lives much of the year. Interspersed among the personal memories are descriptions of working with some of the world's best conductors and Crespin's advice to aspiring singers. Ably translated by Bourdain, an editor at the New York Times and good friend of Crespin's, the book includes a discography and a list of the singer's roles and significant performances. Not as substantive as some of the Wagnerian roles Crespin made famous, but a lovely Mozartian memoir nonetheless. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1997
ISBN: 1-55553-328-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
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
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