A music historian’s (Univ. of Houston) biography of the man who, despite sectarian assaults from the academy, is still regarded as America’s greatest composer. Modern biographers appear to feel obliged to write works that weigh in at several pounds; but, length notwithstanding, Pollack’s book is remarkably taut and clear. Extensive musical analyses, though with minimal technical jargon, replace the meal inventories and party rosters that usually document life’s less dramatic stretches and, given the breadth and diversity of Copland’s (1900—90) work, prove both welcome and diverting. But more original is the narrative design. Rather than simply stringing together what he considers telling episodes, Pollack sounds a theme as it occurs chronologically—political affiliations, professional relationships, personal finances—and then offers a summary of its development and variation across a lifetime. The effect is of parallel expositions that create a superstructure only gradually filled in. New events enter into existing contexts, seeming to assume their prescribed places rather than accreting randomly. Pollack sketches character in the same way, presenting a series of sometimes conflicting accounts from friends and rivals, all meticulously footnoted, and then allowing the reader to judge new disclosures of fact accordingly. He appears to have no psychoanalytic theory about Copland—a leftist Brooklyn Jew who came to grips with his homosexuality in the 1920s—which is a welcome relief. Perhaps his even-handedness and circumspection derive from his subject, a paragon of self-control in an environment uniquely hospitable to self-indulgence. Still, such creditable objectivity, even in describing the aesthetic rigor that, combined with Copland’s compulsive honesty, could disgruntle colleagues, can—t help but stir affection for the man who did more than any other to build a uniquely American musical culture. Not only a success in its own right, but a valuable model of what biography can and probably should be.
Pub Date: March 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-4909-6
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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