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
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
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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