Superb, fully sympathetic life of fiery German conductor Wilhelm FurtwÑngler (1886-1954), who was unfairly blackened as a Nazi convert. Shirakawa, a filmmaker, presents a big, intense picture of FurtwÑngler, who—as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for three decades and of the Vienna Philharmonic for much of that time—was Germany's foremost cultural figure of his day. A musical Wunderkind, he had a phenomenal memory and as a child could play on the piano, from memory, the complete quartets of Beethoven—or anything else that he had heard even once. FurtwÑngler's power over women was equally telepathic. His illegitimate children may well have numbered 13, while he had five by his second wife. His secretary ``scheduled all FurtwÑngler's dalliances with all the alacrity of a master taxi dispatcher.'' Even so, one young mistress complained that he was always composing on the weekends she spent with him. Though FurtwÑngler saw himself as a composer, Shirakawa says, his three symphonies—large brooding works—still await a conductor to bring out their magic. The author makes clear that FurtwÑngler's specialty was a nervous drive that kept audiences on the edges of their seats, a quality that is best captured on his live radio tapes, although his studio Tristan und Isolde does show the conductor at his most sublime. He fought Nazimania, had shouting matches with Hitler, refused to join the Party, and would not conduct in relation to any political activities—but remained in Berlin rather than run off to America, both to protect German music from the Party and to help save Jewish musicians. During the war, FurtwÑngler was bedeviled by the Wagner family and by his rising young rival, Herbert von Karajan, a Party member backed by top Party hacks. Excellent on FurtwÑngler's recording career and worth owning for that alone. For all music lovers. (Thirty halftones—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-19-506508-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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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