Perhaps overlong, this gem of a biography should be the standard reference on an indisputable musical genius.
A superb biography of a great conductor who was dogged by controversy throughout his career.
Born in Salzburg in 1908, Karajan's career began to flourish in 1935. When offered his first important position, Karajan was asked to join the Nazi Party, and he did so—an action that would later cause him considerable grief. Osborne, a music journalist for the BBC, comes to the conclusion that, at worst, Karajan was guilty of ambition and opportunism but little else. Tackling the issue head-on, Osborne provides convincing evidence that Karajan, still quite young at the time of Hitler's rise, was no favorite of the Nazi elite and did little official work for the party. After marrying Anita Güttermann, who was one-quarter Jewish, he got less and less work as time went on and was, by war's end, essentially unemployed. Osborne quotes violinist Nathan Milstein, who noted that Russian colleagues David Oistrach and Leonid Kogin both joined the Communist Party but were never held accountable for Stalin's crimes. He then writes, `Political and ethical relativism is one of the reasons why Soviet artists who were party members were never pursued in the Western media the way German artists were. Way back to the time when pioneering British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb excused the mass murder of the kulaks . . . there has been a long history of toleration—even on occasion justification—of ‘Uncle Joe' Stalin's acts of genocide that would be unthinkable in the case of Hitler's.` Statements like that are bound to generate controversy, but Osborne provides a compelling case for Karajan's innocence, and he backs it with copious documentation. Controversy aside, Osborne is a wonderful biographer and offers a hugely entertaining trove of information and anecdotes about Karajan, his many colleagues, and the classical music world during most of the 20th century. Osborne also possesses that rare gift among writers on music: the ability to write about it in language that both musicians and non-musicians can understand and enjoy.
Perhaps overlong, this gem of a biography should be the standard reference on an indisputable musical genius.Pub Date: May 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-55553-425-2
Page Count: 851
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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