Emphasizing Chopin’s life and times rather than his music, Szulc’s biography situates the composer and pianist extraordinaire within the circles of European artists, writers, and others who created the Romantic era. Award-winning journalist Szulc’s (The Secret Alliance, 1991, etc.) exploration of Chopin’s character focuses on the 18 years he spent in Paris. He sets his inquiry into the broader framework of Chopin’s times, stressing the unique environment of budding Romanticism that the musician discovered when he eached Paris. This account is divided into three chronological sections, rather romantically labeled “Andante,” “Rondo,” and “Coda.” The first serves as an introduction to Chopin’s Polish-French background and the process by which he effected dramatic entry into French society. Szulc discusses the nature of Chopin’s poor physical health and his questionable mental health, foreshadowing the mental crises and debilitating consumption that marked the last years of his short life. Next Szulc turns to the other two “protagonists” of this biography: the Age of Romanticism and George Sand. Chopin’s famed seven-year affair with Sand is the stuff of legend, and Szulc admirably brings the two fascinating personalities to life through citations from letters and other biographers. Sand’s forceful personality electrifies these pages and almost threatens to overwhelm the enigmatic and far more subtle Chopin. More problematic is Szulc’s presentation of Chopin’s milieu. His declaration that European Romanticism represented a unique and unprecedented merging of art and politics lacks clarity, as the politics of the moment are only superficially explained. His attempt to set Chopin within the Romantic movement isn’t much helped by his prose, which intermittently exhibits a highly romantic (and somewhat awkward) tone. Despite stylistic weaknesses, Szulc’s book offers a readable account of the most creative period of Chopin’s life and of the many geniuses he rubbed shoulders with. He also gives a particularly fine impression of the startling effect that Chopin the pianist had upon his listeners. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-82458-2
Page Count: 426
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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