A first-rate biographical study of one of the century's more important conductors, Dimitri Mitropoulos (18961960). Based on the research of late musicologist Oliver Daniel, music critic Trotter has created a comprehensive and neatly written portrait of Mitropoulos, whom he correctly calls the ``Forgotten Giant.'' Tracing his life from student days in Greece to his mature artistic career spent primarily in America (a decade in Minneapolis, where he created an ensemble competitive with the top US orchestras, followed in the 1950s by the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic), Trotter emphasizes that Mitropoulos approached music-making with the self-denying religious fervor that almost had led him as a young man to take a monk's vows. This otherworldly attitude may explain the genuinely tragic circumstances of Mitropoulos's later years: his relative lack of pretense about his own homosexuality at a time when other gay conductors advanced their careers (sometimes at Mitropoulos's expense) by remaining in the closet; his remaining in America instead of returning to Europe, where he was idolized, on the grounds that he could fulfill his missionary service to serious music better in the New World; his carelessness about his health, which led to his premature death of a massive coronary while rehearsing the La Scala Philharmonic in Mahler's Third Symphony. None of this is simple, and with the notable exception of Trotter's overemphasis on the effects of Howard Taubman's New York Times criticismreminiscent of the ``critics killed John Keats'' school of biographyhe avoids many of the potholes of oversimplification. Since Mitropoulos is an elusive conductor on disc, good hints toward a basic discography are included. Humanizing, a valuable panorama of US classical music culture, and an irresistible inducement to seek out the Mitropoulos performances left to us on records. (66 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-931340-81-0
Page Count: 532
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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