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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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