A persuasive brief for Clara Schumann’s right to an honored place in the classical music canon.
Biography of the 19th-century pianist and composer better known today as the wife of Robert Schumann.
Trained by her demanding father to be a child prodigy, Clara Schumann (1819–1896) learned to write music before learning the alphabet, improvised at the piano before she talked in sentences, and was giving private performances by age 7. She made her official debut at 9 in her hometown of Leipzig, touring Europe throughout her teens to acclaim by admirers ranging from Paganini to Goethe. When she married Robert in 1840—after a lawsuit to free her from her controlling father—she was so famous that he was sometimes referred to as “the husband of Clara Wieck.” She used that fame to promote Robert’s compositions and those of their friend Johannes Brahms; neither of these men, musicologist Fritz writes in her impassioned introduction, would have entered the classical music canon without Clara’s efforts, which also boosted the reputations of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. Unsurprisingly, given a relentless touring schedule and the eight children she bore, her work as a composer suffered. “Internalized misogyny sank its claws into her creative will,” is Fritz’s way of describing the generally dismissive attitude toward female composers that certainly had an impact. The biographer’s commendable desire to reclaim Clara’s proper stature as an artist leads too often to such overheated phrases, but her cause is better served by Fritz’s detailed, appreciative descriptions of her compositions, including some interesting observations on how both Robert and Brahms quoted from Clara’s melodies in their own works. Profiles of other then-renowned, now virtually unknown female composers, such as Pauline Viardot and Maria Szymanowska, amply make the point that female artists struggled for recognition then—and now, when their works rarely appear on concert programs. Fritz’s tendency to beat this well-established point into the ground only slightly mars her punchy, vividly written narrative.
A persuasive brief for Clara Schumann’s right to an honored place in the classical music canon.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798897101887
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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