The definitive biography of a uniquely American cultural figure. In 1869, when 40-year-old composer and piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk died in Rio de Janeiro, South America and much of Europe went into mourning. In his native United States, newspaper retrospectives portrayed his career as a descent from genius into triviality and scandal. With this contrast, Oberlin College president Starr (Red and Hot: Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1983) begins his exhaustively researched, solidly written study of a musical artist whose short but eventful life encapsulates the history of concert music in the New World during the first half of the 19th century. Born in New Orleans to a Creole mother of ``aristocratic'' origins and an English Jewish father who had a second family living three blocks away from his ``legal'' one, Gottschalk was indelibly formed by parental duplicities and childhood insecurities (his father eventually went bankrupt). As an adult, he inhabited the same world as piano virtuoso Franz Liszt and had the same cataclysmic effect on audiences: Men wept, women swooned. But Gottschalk did not understand that American public opinion would not take kindly to even a few notorious affairs, though Liszt got away with dozens of liaisons in Europe. Despite being hailed as ``the first and greatest composer of the age'' as late as 1864, Gottschalk was ultimately forced to decamp for South America, where he garnered artistic triumphs but no lasting financial success. Though he persuasively argues that Gottschalk's work had greater artistic merit than his received reputation as a composer of salon music and party pieces with a Latin American flavor, the author does not purport to offer a detailed musical exegesis of the compositions. Everything else is here, however, including the famous ``six piano'' marathon concerts and an astute appraisal of Gottschalk's reputation in the 125 years since his death. Starr's scholarly passion provides key insights into an emerging national culture. (40 halftone illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-507237-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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 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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