A unique perspective on the Wagners, centered on the clan’s most controversial member and most tumultuous period.
Austrian historian Hamann (Hitler’s Vienna, 1999) tells the story of a British-born woman who married into Germany’s legendary musical family and befriended the leader of the Third Reich.
Orphaned in 1899, before she turned two, Winifred Williams in 1907 went to live in Germany with the Klindworths, an elderly couple distantly related to her mother. Karl Klindworth, who had studied with Liszt and was friendly with his daughter Cosima, Richard Wagner’s widow, introduced Winifred to the inner circles of the German music scene. At 17, the striking young woman charmed 45-year-old Siegfried Wagner, Cosima’s only son and director of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual staging of the patriarch’s operas. Their marriage made headlines, since Britain and Germany were at war, and Winifred would remain at the heart of a family and country in conflict for decades. The Wagners’ opinions were newsworthy, and in 1923, Siegfried and Winifred both vocally supported a charismatic young politician named Adolf Hitler. Winifred’s bond with the Führer would give her immense satisfaction and worldwide infamy in the years to come. Hamann diligently explores this naïve young woman’s slow seduction by wealth and power. At Bayreuth, tough, strong-willed Winifred handled the business end while her husband concentrated on the artistic side. Her power and confidence rose, and when Siegfried died in 1930, 33-year-old Winifred became head of the family enterprise. Each of the many times the festival was in financial jeopardy, she turned to her famous friend Hitler for support. When events in Germany took a turn grimmer than anything in the Ring, Winifred could do little more than carefully use her influence to rescue friends at risk of persecution, or worse. Providing a complete and thorough portrait of Winifred, Hamann shows how the Wagner legacy became enmeshed in Hitler’s propaganda machine.
A unique perspective on the Wagners, centered on the clan’s most controversial member and most tumultuous period.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101308-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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