Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs, continues his exploration of the giants of American popular song, begun in The Song Is Ended (1995), with a biography of the man who may have been the greatest of them all. Richard Rodgers was in many ways unique among the great composers of American theater music. He enjoyed lengthy partnerships with two very different lyricists of the first caliber, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. He established himself not only as a great songwriter but as a highly regarded composer of soundtrack music, winning awards for his scores for Victory at Sea and The Valiant Years. His career—after some inconclusive noodling around after college—consisted of an ever-upward trajectory with few bumps along the way until he was well into his 50s. And unlike the other great Jewish tunesmiths who dominated the Broadway stage in the golden era of musical theater, he was the product of a well-to-do family, never experiencing poverty, never struggling for his next dollar. The last two facts may go some way in explaining why Hyland’s new biography of Rodgers is such a dull read: There just isn’t much drama in this life. On the other hand, Hyland doesn’t help himself with his approach, an awkward veering between biographical detail and musical analysis that is too perfunctory with both. As a result, one never has much sense of Rodgers as a personality, despite lengthy descriptions of his behavior and attitude toward colleagues and friends, nor much understanding of what made him such a fine composer. Nor does Hyland really give much context for the innovations of Rodgers’s work with each of his great partners. The book is constructed entirely out of library research, with no interviewing, and it has the musty air of the library throughout. Intelligent, but utterly lifeless. (17 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07115-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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