by Sherrill Milnes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1998
Autobiographical fluff for opera aficionados interested in knowing a bit—but not too much—about the life of one of America’s popular baritones. Just as baritones never win the woman in operas, they rarely get the attention afforded tenors. Who has ever heard of a Three Baritones concert? Milnes’s autobiography attempts to right that wrong regarding his own life. He begins with his experiences as a farm boy outside Chicago. Milnes was a relative latecomer to serious vocal music study. He began in high school, although he—d been studying violin and singing in his mother’s church choir since elementary school. By his college years, it was clear that music also lay in Milnes’s future. He auditioned for parts in regional opera groups, such as Boris Goldovsky’s Opera Theatre, and gradually made his way to the Metropolitan Opera, where he sang regularly for just over 30 years. During that period, which included appearances in operas around the world and an extensive recital schedule, Milnes sang with many of the best, including Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo, and Beverly Sills. Unfortunately, though, this meandering book is rather short on details. Meandering how? A page about the teenage Milnes heading off to a brothel is followed by several paragraphs on the trials of having a “girl’s” first name. As for the absent details, his two failed marriages are dismissed in a we-grew-apart sentence or two. Comments on colleagues are fairly superficial and do little to shed light on the world behind the opera curtain. The author has included a performance chronology of his debuts and key performances, as well as a discography. What could have been Wagnerian in scope ends up instead as the literary equivalent of a Top 40 tune. (50 illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-02-864739-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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