Not really a biography, but an episodic social history centering on the life of ragtime composer Scott Joplin. Historian Curtis (Purdue; A Consuming Faith, not reviewed) has selected as her focus several key events in Joplin's life: his rural upbringing in Northern Texas; his undocumented visit to the 1903 St. Louis Exposition, where he may have performed; his years in Sedalia, Mo., where he created his greatest works; the Chicago World's Fair, another venue that he likely visited; and pre-WW I New York City. Part of the author's frustration (and the reader's) is what she calls Joplin's ``invisibility''; little documentary evidence, whether in Joplin's own hand or from contemporary newspaper accounts, survives to verify the often sketchy memories of his younger contemporaries. Curtis correctly states that part of the reason for Joplin's failure to leave much of a mark on his time was that he was a transitional figure, still subscribing to Victorian ideas of culture even as he announced a new musical world through his compositions. And she correctly notes the inherent racism in white America that denied Joplin performance opportunities or even much income from his work. But in analyzing Joplin's failure to leave a mark on either white or black culture, Curtis misses a fundamental point about his music: Joplin accepted the myth that European music was superior to his own ragtime and so wasted his last years toiling on the failed classical opera Treemonisha. The work's failure in both white and African-American communities was due to its old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century musical character, not to either racism or provincialism, as the author suggests. The text is also unfortunately marred by the author's use of trendy academic jargon. While it's refreshing to read a book about a popular musician written by someone with real credentials as a historian, Curtis sadly lacks enough knowledge about music to carry off her task.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8262-0949-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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