Blending first-person narrative with the voices of many acclaimed performers and close friends, legendary sitar player and Indian musical ambassador Shankar tells his story, replete with art, philosophy, and unforgettable encounters. The gods were gracious to Shankar, granting him the excellence in a range of fields for which an ordinary human being would need a slew of reincarnations. He began his career as a dancer, choreographer, and musician in his brother’s troupe, which toured extensively in Europe and America in the 1930s. Already accustomed to a celebrity lifestyle in his teens, Ravi returned to India in order to study with music guru Allaudin Khan, who demanded harsh discipline and total submission. After seven years mastering the sitar, Shankar, married and with a small child, started composing ballet scores for the “cultural squad” of the Communist Party. Soon disillusioned by its stifling ideology, he turned to traditional Indian wisdom, learning from yogis like Tat Baba and Sai Baba. At 29, Shankar assumed the post of Music Director at All India Radio. Later he began blending Indian and Western sonorities, a path that would eventually lead him to joint concerts with George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin, and the London Symphony. Though criticized for “commercializing” his heritage by playing to huge hippie audiences, Shankar always sought to educate his Western listeners about the principles of Indian music and to instill in them respect for his sacred art. While performing and recording around the world, he found time to compose film scores, set up music schools in India and California, take on disciples, write books, serve in Parliament, and engage in amorous adventures. But the most lyrical and introspective pages of his autobiography are reserved for his wife, Sankya, and his daughter and musical disciple, Annoushka. Unpretentious and spiritually illuminating as Shankar’s music.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56649-104-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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