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MOZART

Name: MOZART
Author: Maynard Solomon
ISBN: 0-06-019046-9

A LIFE

by Maynard Solomon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 1995

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Finally, a Mozart biography that evokes a believable portrait of a striving, powerfully creative human being. Solomon, author of the ground-breaking life of Beethoven (1977), now turns his attention to the ``miracle which God let be born in Salzburg.'' The result is magisterial. Solomon's overriding ambition is to dismember what he calls the ``Myth of [Mozart] the Eternal Child,'' a view of the composer as a divinely inspired perpetual adolescent. The myth had its unseemly origins in the efforts of Mozart's father, Leopold, to keep his fiercely talented son subservient. By contrast, as laid out in Solomon's thoughtful, dignified and always readable narrative, one comes to appreciate that Mozart—despite numerous personal struggles and pervasive familial and societal restraints—had achieved a dramatic psychological as well as artistic maturity by the time of his death at age 35. Solomon's own ground rules are those of Freudian orthodoxy; not every reader will agree with every one of his interpretations. Still, the known facts are presented so clearly, and Solomon's analytic bias is so overt, that even a less than critical reader is in no risk of being misled. It also must be admitted that the lives of few other artists present so much material that feels right at home on the analytic couch. Mozart's father was the most successful imaginable musical pedagogue and impresario for his son; he was also a self-deceiving, self- defeating paranoid whose exploitation of both his children's phenomenal abilities feels, to a modern sensibility, perilously close to child abuse. Mozart grew from the devoted prodigy to the prolific and consummate craftsman (and, in Solomon's view, more of a musical radical than conventional musical history has been willing to allow), as well as a sometimes agonized husband and father and an emblematic member of a rapidly changing society. How he did so forms the matter of Solomon's work. A splendid book with ramifications for the whole study of Western culture, not just classical music.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1995

ISBN: 0-06-019046-9

Page Count: 656

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)