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
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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