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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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