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
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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