A personal friend of the celebrated opera singer offers a pedestrian but solid biography notable for extensive quotes from Callas’s own reflections on her life and career. The basic facts are well known. Galatopoulos (Italia Opera, not reviewed, etc.), a music critic and biographer who first met the soprano in 1947, maintains a respectful—indeed, rather dull—tone as he sketches the familiar tale: unhappy childhood in New York and Athens; pushed as a musical prodigy by her domineering mother; brilliant, controversial success in the1950s as a passionate singing actress unafraid to make harsh sounds if they served the cause of characterization; her liaison with Aristotle Onassis; increasing vocal problems that led to her retirement from the operatic stage in 1965; and sudden death, probably from heart failure, at the age of 53 in 1977. Taking a Maria’s-eye view, the author presents every cancellation as due to ill health or a hostile management’s unreasonable demands; the break-up of her marriage as the result of her husband’s money-grubbing (the affair with Onassis began later, she claimed); the famous feuds as media exaggerations (she even liked fellow diva Renata Tebaldi, at first). None of this is especially interesting or convincing, but the author’s obvious personal investment in Callas is justified by the marvelous material he elicited from her about her work. Lengthy quotations reveal the diva’s sharp intelligence, her reverence for opera’s history and traditions, her emotional engagement with each role, and her complete dedication to fulfilling the composer’s intentions. Galatopoulos’s enthusiastic descriptions of Callas’s greatest performances—in Norma, Medea, Tosca; as Violetta in La Traviata—make her genius live for those who never saw her. Neither the writing nor the thinking are sophisticated enough to make this a great biography, but to emphasize Callas’s revolutionary artistry over her private affairs makes for a refreshing change from lurid pieces of recent pop-psych speculation (e.g., Arianna Stassinopoulos’s Maria Callas, l981). (100 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85985-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
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
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