A nearly impossible task, recording this lush life, but Shawn helps us comprehend the magic.
A few luscious slices from the massive cake that was the life of the great pianist, composer, conductor and public personality (1918-1990).
In this latest entry in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, Shawn (Composition and Music History/Bennington Coll.; Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life, 2007, etc.) begins with some vignettes and then embraces chronology, confessing the impossibility of confining such a life as Bernstein’s between the covers of a book. We learn about his parents, his schooling (Boston Latin and Harvard, where he emerged as a star) and his early realization that he “was physically attracted to both sexes.” Although Shawn does not focus intently on Bernstein’s sex life (there are more urgent items on his agenda), he does remind us throughout that Bernstein had a variety of lovers, as well as a long, sometimes-troubled marriage and three children. The author describes Bernstein’s gift as a pianist and his segue into conducting; his big break came in 1943, when he stepped in to conduct the New York Philharmonic, a life-changing success. Since he has few pages and a lot to discuss, Shawn can pause only occasionally to discuss a Bernstein composition in detail (he does so with The Age of Anxiety and Candide, among others). But the author reminds us of Bernstein’s long-lost music for Peter Pan and writes with near reverence about his 53 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Shawn also discusses West Side Story (and the genesis of Bernstein’s friendship with young lyricist Stephen Sondheim), his passion for Mahler, his championing of American classical music, the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and his liberal social and political stances. (He once attended a Jimi Hendrix concert.) Shawn gives some space to Bernstein’s critics, as well, and he does not neglect the composer’s final sad slide.
A nearly impossible task, recording this lush life, but Shawn helps us comprehend the magic.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-14428-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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