A popular biography of Russia's most famous composer, with particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation and the controversy surrounding his death. How can you actively dislike a book honest enough to refer the reader on page one to the current ``standard survey of Tchaikovsky's work . . . David Brown's monumental `critical and biographical study' ''? Nonetheless, anyone fortunate enough to have access to the four-volume Brown study or even Brown's slighter Tchaikovsky Remembered will not need this new effort. Biographer Holden (Laurence Olivier, 1988, etc.) weighs in on the side of those scholars who assess the composer's guilt over his homosexuality as the dominant theme of his emotional life. Convinced that his death at age 53 was the result not of cholera (the official explanation) but of suicide brought on by fear of official exposure as a sodomist, Holden even sides with those who believe that Tchaikovsky was condemned to self-destruction by the verdict of a ``court of honor'' made up of his old law school classmates. This may be, although the biographer admits that the evidence is not conclusive and that even if Tchaikovsky's conduct had become known to the tsar, the sort of punishment and ruin that befell Oscar Wilde cannot be automatically assumed. What, if anything, all this tabloid-worthy detail adds to a listener's appreciation of Tchaikovsky's ravishing music or the prodigious quantity of his artistic output is unclear. Despite the author's stated desire to connect the music to the composer's suffering, little of real intellectual nourishment is offered. A list of ``Recommended Recordings'' is so lacking in cogent annotation as to be virtually worthless. The basic facts are here and it's not badly written, but this is not the kind of artist's biography that fulfills its primary function: sending the reader back to the music with eager ears and new insight.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42006-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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