RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAttentive ... Hilburn excels ... Hilburn highlights many forgotten soundtracks that make Newman look like a workaholic.
Carrie Courogen
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBrisk, agreeable ... Courogen treats May with the respect her talent deserves without overselling the \"Hollywood done her wrong\" angle or falling into too much rapture ... If Courogen can’t match May’s wit, it’s to her credit that she doesn’t try.
Warren Zanes
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksZanes... makes you feel Springsteen’s implacable determination ... Zanes’s Nebraska narrative portrays an artist driven by a remorseless muse beyond any monetary payoff.
Alex Ross
MixedLos Angeles Review of Books... encyclopedic ... With deep-focus detail, Ross compiles and frames all of Wagner’s life and work ... Given the many tin-eared treatises Wagner authored or inspired, Ross struggles to convince skeptics that the composer’s music still holds relevance, that its beauty can still touch hesitant souls. The plots of his operas sometimes scan like feeble Grimms’ fairy tales ... provides a thick and convoluted treatment of a thick and convoluted subject, gathering up so much scattered research that it feels weighted, bogged down. In 1998, Ross published an essay in The New Yorker called \'The Unforgiven,\' which addressed Wagner’s antisemitism in a way that was bracingly clear — and twice as compelling as this 750-page marathon ... Ross gives Wagnerites much to chew on in his magisterial new volume ... On the plus side, Ross excels at dismantling many Wagnerian myths ... As the pages pile up and Ross travels from Victorian Britain to Czarist Russia to Gilded Age America, canvassing a wide assortment of different Wagners (including, alongside the Nazi Wagner, Jewish and Black Wagners), reading the book comes to seem not unlike the chore of sitting through one of the master’s operas ... Ross is a sure-handed guide through the knottiest thickets of Wagnerian apocrypha.
Will Birch
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksBirch’s book respects this story with a flood of quotes, even as he wisely resists philosophizing. He makes two key decisions that boost the narrative considerably, but only near the end: he siphons a lot of Lowe family prehistory (grandparents and the like) into an appendix. This plunges readers straight into the music without fussing over dusty birth certificates and census data. Then he channels music critic Peter Silverton for his own choice insights ... Birch slings plenty of Lowe quotes too, many of them howlers.
Nigel Cliff
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books...while Cliff, a British historian, presents a wider angle, portraying the piano world as a frenzy of liaisons and threading his story with larger cultural and geopolitical details ... Cliff offers such a sweeping perspective... As it is, those who prefer an insider narrative will favor Isacoff, while those less concerned with musical details will choose Cliff’s book. That being said, each of these authors presents a diligent account, with Cliff getting the nod for compression and elegance.
