Some mild friction between two bright men sparks striking observations about music.
Edited transcripts of nine intense interviews with the celebrated British composer.
Guardian music critic Service is respectful and generous throughout these conversations, which traverse much of the geography of classical music, then and now. Occasionally, he even accepts a body blow without much complaint. In a discussion about Benjamin Britten, for instance, Adès calls the content of Service’s question “the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.” The conversations focus often on Adès’ own compositions, especially his opera The Tempest (2004 premiere), based on Shakespeare’s play, and Service elicits from him a number of insights, large and small (he composes on an electric piano with earphones). Their talk also ranges into the past, and we learn that Adès loves Stravinsky and Beethoven, and that he admires Verdi’s “pure animal cunning.” Although there is some music-theory-techie talk here (discussions about stacked fifths and “irrational functional tonality”), most readers will have no trouble following the flow. Adès emerges as highly articulate, rarely wry and often peremptory—the words “I could be wrong” are not in evidence. But he does say many arresting and memorable things—e.g., “Writing music is like trying to capture the face in the fire”; “I think my music ought to affect something in the individual; not something in the shared, lizard part of the brain, as perhaps some stadium music does.” Service manages to get Adès talking rather than debating, but the interviewer does challenge when Adès says something surprising, like calling the finale of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 “a terrible waste of space.”
Some mild friction between two bright men sparks striking observations about music.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-27632-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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