Customer Reviews:
Mind, music, and emotion........2003-10-21
Ostwald has written a careful and insightful biography. Not only are effects of mental illness in musical creativity explored, but there are a number of interesting philosophical issues raised about mind and it's functioning. The subjective experience of creativity, musical or otherwise, is impossible to communicate fully, but Ostwald does a remarkable job. Ostwald's thoughts on musical expression and meanings therein are original, and not extensions of Suzanne Langer's (or other philosophers') interpretation. That Ostwald himself is a pianist as well as psychiatrist allows an intimate understanding of musical cognition, and this in conjuntion with his psychiatric training makes for an unusual analysis. This is not light reading,but definitely in range of an interested reader. It is thought-provoking and facinating. I highly recommend it.
Music, meaning and madness.......2003-02-12
Ostwald isn't a normal biographer. He is concerned with more than the 'facts'. His focus is on the complex relationship between Schumann's music, his life, his mental state and his relationship with Clara. But to this end he has done a major service to our understanding of Schumann by going well beyond the published sources. Ostwald has translated hitherto unpublished diaries and correspondence that reveal a Schumann who is considerably more complex than he appears in biographies up to this.
Certainly, Ostwald's interest in the psychiatric elements of Schumann's life results in a certain amount of terminology, but this is not jargon; there is a chapter which reviews Schumann's illnesses using current American diagnostic guildelines, so this is hardly psychobabble!
Ostwald is also a tireless advocate of the less-well-known Schumann, for which he also deserves credit.
And finally, the chapter on Schumann's final illness is haunting and chilling. He died a much more wretched death than we supposed.
Strongly recommended.
tedious reading because of the psychological focus.......2001-12-19
While there is much interesting information in this book about one of my favorite composers, the book is tedious to read. Every event, decision, feeling of Schumann is analyzed in psychological terms, and never insightful in any way.. each of the (TOO FREQUENT) observations breaks the flow of the story, and they never provide insights that we wouldn't have drawn ourselves, and this finally distracts so much that the reading becomes tedious. For example, what is the point of telling the reader about the psychological effects of a death of a sister or father? I'm a human being, I know this all too well, just tell the story of this great composer.. the only point of reading this ultimately is to make the music come alive for me. There is not much discussion of Schumann's music, what is there is not deep enough to provide any deeping of appreciation or understanding of the music. Regret I didn't get the other newer biography (but more expensive)
Psychoanalytic jargon mars otherwise good book........2000-01-13
Peter Ostwald's biography of Schumann provides a nice introduction to Schumann's life and works, though I wish a little more time had been spent on his music. The book provides a detailed enough overview of Schumann's childhood and adolescence, with insights into the events that shaped his adult life and world view. The account of the long struggle with Clara's father for permission for the couple to marry was tedious, perhaps providing us with an existential glimpse of the couple's frustration. What was lacking, however, was a convincing explanation of how the licentious and worldly adolescent became an introverted, retiring adult. We are left to observe and speculate without assistance from the author.
What I found tiresome about the book was Ostwald's obvious psychoanalytic epistemology. Schumann's behaviors are described in classical psychoanalytic jargon, which tended to obscure Schumann the person behind a two-dimensional Freudian stereotype. Ostwald's nterpretations are reductionistic and trite, and demonstrate a lack of imagination in exploring the subtle nuances of human behavior, which is as much a criticism of psychoanalytic interpretation of human behavior as it is a criticism of Ostwald's approach in particular. There is a certain intellectual tyranny here that is unappealing. Sometimes, this Freudian speculation borders on the absurd. Ostwald describes a medical treatment where Schumann must insert an injured hyperextended finger into the intestines of a recently slaughtered animal - a treatment which is designed to act much like a heating pad. Ostwald describes this as a form of necrophilia. How might we describe the use of bleeding by leeches from a psychoanalytic perspective? I shudder to think.
I wish psychiatrists or psychologists from orientations other than psychoanalytic would write musical biographies. Maynard Solomon (Beethoven & Mozart biographies) is also a psychoanalyst, but at least he is a bit more subtle. I wonder how a cognitive-behaviorist would handle a biography of Beethoven, Schumann, or Bruckner? Perhaps I'll have to write one.
Book Description
The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work.
In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman.
Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.
Customer Reviews:
Uncle Remus turned upside down!.......2005-02-27
In some ways, this could be seen as the flipside to the Uncle Remus stories(which celebrated many aspects of plantation life). Chesnutt, the first African-American known to write a large number of shiort stories, tells the tales of Uncle Julius McAdoo, who tells his white employers tales of slavery with harrowing underpinnings about seperation of families and other hardships, usually in an ironic style. Considering that these stories were written in the 1890s when sentiental tales of plantation lifewere popular, this is a significant piece of work-buy it.
A must for anyone interested in African American Literature.......2002-03-16
What is most interesting about these stories is both the narrative framework & the way the narrator of the stories about the black community (there are essentially two narrators) uses magic ("The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy" especially) to usurp the authority of the white landowner (the primary narrator, who is re-telling the stories Julius has told him). Maybe it takes an understanding of African American literary traditions-- signifying, call & response, etc, to really dig in, but you can still relate without that background.
There are multiple layers of narration going on-- and once you can get through those layers, you can both enjoy the story-line and understand something pivotal about the way the African American genre works. The dialect and speech patterns are represented in a way that was criticized by some early African American writers who wanted a more "realistic" "naturalistic" and political structure. But underneath the "quaint" nature of the stories about magic & the slave/master relationship are some very subtle and very powerful images of how the slave and master influence *each other*-- that there are differences in the power dynamic than what we expect. It might be hard to get into the language-- but once you do, it's not overdone. Read the dialect the way you would learn another language; it's English, with a twist. There is also a great story on "passing," and some exploration of voodoo. This is a text that should be taught alongside Faulkner & Flannery O'Connor-- another look at the South.
a collection of African American folk tales.......2001-05-01
The stories in this collection range from the mediocre to excellent. Most of the stories feature an Uncle Remus like character named Julius McAdoo telling anecdotes about plantation life to a white couple from the North. Julius talks in dialect which makes the text difficult to understand at times. Additionally, in terms of plot and structure, many of the stories seem repetative. My favorite story in the collection is located in the previously unpublished stories section. I can't remember the name but I think it has the word "tree" in the title.
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Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936
Anne Goodwyn Jones
Manufacturer: Louisiana State University Press
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Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990
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Killers of the Dream
ASIN: 0807108669 |
Book Description
Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield.
The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, restores to print the author's most masterful stories and novellasincluding "The Light in the Piazza" - and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time. This collection celebrates a six-decade career devoted to the art of the story and the novella - a literary event for the lover of short fiction.
Customer Reviews:
Not Only for Southerners.......2002-05-14
I'm reading this now, savouring it, allowing one story a day. The stories are gems, polished without feeling workshopped, elegant without seeming traditional, classics yet not stodgy. Spencer's understanding of the nuances of class are superb, and her settings are evocative, rich and compelling. I've read little Southern fiction and spent even less time below the Mason-Dixon line, but these stories still seem real to me, important, touching and relevant. Highly recommended.
Stories of delicacy and insight.......2001-08-27
Elizabeth Spencer's short stories are elegantly written and filled with moments of delicacy and insight. "Ship of Fools," written many years ago, retains a freshness in its youthful protagonist's perceptions, while her best-known work, "Light in the Piazza," takes the reader into an ethereal, long-lost but bewitching Italian setting. As piercing as her insights into human dynamics is her ability to capture a peculiar quality of light or the dreamy interior world of her many characters. Spencer expertly juxtaposes passages of apparently random stream-of-consciousness with exchanges between men and women that illustrate the kinds of tangled relationships we all make and encounter in daily life. There's never just surface events taking place in Spencer's fiction; much is constantly going on beneath the surface, which for me generates the kind of depth found only in the very best fiction. I strongly recommend her work to readers looking for prose that can be read and re-read, savored and enjoyed, many times over.
Book Description
Phoebe Yates Pember's A Southern Woman's Story is the inaugural volume in the University of South Carolina Press's new paperback series, American Civil War Classics. First published in 1879, the book chronicles Phoebe Pember's experiences as matron of the Confederate Chimborazo Hospital from November 1862 until the fall of Richmond in April 1865. Long an important source in Confederate history, A Southern Woman's Story is also a valuable book for students and scholars of women's history and the social history of the Civil War.
In many ways Phoebe Yates Pember (1823-1913) was a representative upper-class gentlewoman. Daughter of a Jewish merchant of Charleston who moved his family to Savannah in the 1850s, she sought ways to help the Southern cause—but she broke all stereotypes by the character and length of her service.
Widowed and childless in 1861, Pember took the post of matron at the Confederate Army's Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She labored there throughout the war and in 1879 recorded her experiences in A Southern Woman's Story. No dilettante's romance or saccharine Lost Cause tale, it is a remarkably frank treatment of Confederate social and medical history. Pember reports on the gossip and scandals from inside the Confederacy's largest hospital and the embattled city of Richmond, presenting bureaucratic personalities and stock characters with insight and occasional flashes of humor.
Pember was honored by Confederate veterans' organizations in her later years, and in 1995 her portrait appeared on a U.S. Postal Service Civil War commemorative stamp.
Customer Reviews:
A pearl of great price...........2007-06-03
Originally published in 1879, this one qualifies as an original source document, and is, indeed, a gem. Prior to the Civil War, it was considered "improper" for a woman to walk inside a hospital, much less work in one. War creates need, and need creates change....The Confederacy passed the "Matron Law" in 1862 as an attempt to free Doctors to treat patients. It worked. Many of the ladies the Confederacy was able to hire were free blacks, or even slaves. Phoebe Pember was a rich, high society, Jewish lady from Charleston, SC, who wanted to help in the war effort. She took a job as Head Matron of Division #2 at Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, the largest Hospital of the war. [The site on East Broad St. now holds the Confederate Medical Museum, though no original buildings still stand] This short account of day to day life in Hell is always inspiring, usually charming, and sometimes even funny. [the infamous whiskey barrell]. Through it all, the patients ate, the Doctors had enough supplies to get by, and the Hospital still had resources at the end. President Davis said that the Medical Department was the only part of the Confederacy that wasn't demoralized by the end; ladies like Phoebe Pember made it happen. She made Dr. McCaw and his staff better doctors. Mrs. Pember was a successful magazine writer for many years after the war; we can all be thankful that she wrote of her wartime experiences. Read this one, and be inspired....
Having reviewed this wonderful book, I shall now digress into one of my pet theories: Why were the best hospitals, both government and private, run by rich society ladies like Mrs. Pember and Capt. Sally Tompkins? [and there were others]. What is it about a high level lady that makes her the best boss? Answer: ladies like them won't tolerate dirt, inefficiency, stupidity, or insolence. From the time they are little girls, they are raised to command. They are accustomed to deference, and we to giving it to them; further, they recognize merit in others, and aren't afraid to reward it. In the specific context of wartime Richmond, Mrs. Pember and Captain Sally had financial resourses of their own AND they could knock on the doors of others like themselves without getting the doors slammed in their faces.
Perhaps elsewhere I can discuss why preference in Surgical residencies should be given to girls. Why should [almost] all Surgeons be female? Maybe later....
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A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)
Augusta Jane Evans
Manufacturer: University of South Carolina Press
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ASIN: 1570034400 |
Book Description
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (1835-1909) was one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novelists and outspoken supporters of the Confederacy. Her nine novels include the recently reissued Beulah, the stridently pro-Confederate Macaria, and the extremely successful St. Elmo, which had sales rivaling those of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur. In addition to writing best-selling books, Wilson was a powerful letter-writer whose correspondents included prominent Confederate leaders. Wilson's epistles, 112 of which are gathered in this volume, reveal the depth of her ambitions for herself and the Confederacy.
Wilson worked hard to place herself at the center of action during the Civil War and after the surrender assiduously maintained her correspondence with prominent people of her day. In addition to writing Confederate propaganda, her wartime activities included an extended correspondence with General P. G. T. Beauregard and Confederate congressman Jabez L. M. Curry. In her letters Wilson reviews battle plans and military policy, offers political advice, and illumines the hardships suffered by southerners. Her correspondence portrays her as an assertive, well-educated woman who addressed powerful men on equal terms and only occasionally lapsed into traditional feminine deference. Of equal interest, the volume includes Wilson's writings to friends, publishers, fans, and family members. Wilson's working correspondence with her editors and myriad admirers captures her views on the purposes of fiction, the trials of publishing during the war, and the difficulties of combining career and family.
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- Beautifully touching.
- A moving tribute to a beautiful woman.
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Mama's Homemade Love: A Southern Woman Leaves a Legacy
Barbara M. Sims
Manufacturer: Barbour Publishing, Incorporated
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Braun IRT 4020 ThermoScan Ear Thermometer
ASIN: 1577485785 |
Book Description
Meet Mama. She daily bakes the "Staff of Life" and serves it hot, and transforms lace and organdy into Easter dresses. Watch Mama. She made roux before Cajun cooking ever became popular and was frying green tomatoes before they built the Whistle Stop Caf. Listen to Mama. You can hear her singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," with her hands in the dishwater and cornbread in the oven. Mama's life, told in twenty-five vignettes by her daughter Barbara Sims, quickly unfolds as Mama creates exquisite handiwork, cooks blue ribbon recipes, and tends her flower and vegetable garden. While quietly displaying a deep and abiding love for God, family, friends, and young children, Mama comes to represent all mothers who leave a legacy of simple living and loving service. You'll laugh and cry as you experience Mama's Homemade Love! Includes many of Mama's delicious recipes, including Coconut Pie and Gumbo.
Customer Reviews:
Beautifully touching........1999-11-04
This book is an excellent portrait of a mother--the author's mother, my mother, and probably your mother. It speaks of bygone days, when families were close and love was lavishly bestowed to all. One cannot read this book without returning to those remembered days of years gone by, to taste the homemade recipes prepared by loving hands, to chuckle at the mistakes made in youth, or to be moved to tears by the loving acts and sad losses we all have shared with this author. Mrs. Sims has painted such a clear picture of Mama, her strength, moral character, and loving attitude, that we feel we have known her a lifetime. In my opinion, this book is an absolute treasure that should be shared with everyone.
A moving tribute to a beautiful woman........1999-05-12
This book reminds us all of the importance and power of a life well-lived. Helen (mama to the author, mamaw to me), the subject of this book, was both an amazing person and a symbol of those we have loved who have gone before us, or who are still with us for a while longer. It will engender in the reader a greater appreciation for both. In a time of moral turbulence she is a beacon of the magnificent possibilities of an honest and simple life. This book is a well written tribute told in brief vignettes sure to elicit many smiles and not a few tears.
Alan Sims Helen's Oldest Grandchild
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Bridge to paradise
Kathleen Rollins
Manufacturer: Arcadia House
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Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: B0007JG93Q |
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Caroline Gordon As Novelist and Woman of Letters (Southern Literary Studies)
Rose Ann C. Fraistat
Manufacturer: Louisiana State Univ Pr
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ASIN: 0807111511 |
Books:
- Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf: With a Fully-Orchestrated and Narrated CD
- She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband
- Shostakovich: A Life
- Singing Lessons: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Hope, and Healing (with CD)
- Steichen: Biography, A
- Strange Piece of Paradise
- Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
- Talk to Her: Interviews
- Teaching Genius: Dorothy DeLay and the Making of a Musician
- The Beatles Forever: A Spectacular Collection of Memories
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Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age"
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings
Johannes Brahms: A Biography
Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician
