Another composer's life from Taylor (Robert Schumann, 1982, etc.), whose clichÇ-ridden prose delivers a leaden account of the fascinating Kurt Weill (1900-50). Taylor takes advantage of recently uncovered Weill family memorabilia and juvenilia, as well as of the outburst of scholarly interest in both the life and music of Weill that has occurred during the past 15 years. The author is at his best in creating the various sociohistorical contexts of Weill's lifetime. His first chapter exploring Weill's Jewish family life as the son of a cantor provides a convenient reference point by which he measures Weill's student years during WW I; the associations with Brecht and Lotte Lenya in decadent postwar Berlin that culminated in the Dreigroschenoper and Mahogany; and the composer's later life in America. There, having divorced Lenya just before leaving Hitlerian Europe, Weill would remarry her, and would adapt his musical style to American tastes to create Lady in the Dark, Street Scene, and Lost in the Stars. Unfortunately, Taylor's musical comments are pedestrian and often needlessly complicate simple concepts: ``Such a procedure expresses the simple psychological reality that the interpolation of moments of diatonic consonance relaxes the tension inherent in dissonant, chromatic styles and allows the listener a passing glimpse of the familiar musical world in which he has grown up and which he accepts as by nature his own.'' Factually precise but uninspired: a biography that synthesizes much recent scholarship but offers little in the way of psychological or musical insight. (Illustrations.)
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1992
ISBN: 1-55553-147-4
Page Count: 351
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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