Book Description
Based on dozens of interviews and extensive research, this book covers the breadth of Walter Matthau's often-complicated personal life and multi-faceted career.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful book about an all time great star.......2004-01-07
Walter Matthau is one of my favorite movie stars. He was a great comic actor, and (as noted in this book) he also played drama as well as just about anyone. Plus, off-camera, he was such a memorable personality. This book is loaded with facts and insight about Matthau's life, and interviews with people who knew him. I particularly loved reading about his childhood on the Lower East Side, his time spent during World War II, how he broke into the entertainment industry, and his lifelong gambling problem. Great book!!!!
excellent book!!!!!!!.......2003-03-12
I've always been a fan of Walter Matthau, and was looking forward to reading this book. I found that it was loaded with information about him. I didn't know that he appeared in so many 1950s television shows, for example, and that he acted in so many dramas before playing Oscar Madison. I also enjoyed reading about his childhood, his military service in World War II, and his friendship with Jack Lemmon. A first-class read!!!
Portrait of a star (including warts).......2003-02-19
Walter Matthau always enjoyed fabricating his past. From false name (Matuschanaskayasky) to false ancestors (his father was not an orthodox priest). Most of his biographers dutifully reported all those false informations he fed them over the years, until the "real" person of the actor nearly disappeared under the flood of anecdotes. Now - the long list filled with the names of interviewed persons confirms it - Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg set out to search after the "real" Walter Matthau. From his miserable childhood on New York's lower East-Side to the U.S.Army Air-Corps, to Broadway. Scene-stealing supporting parts in films, and finally, the big breakthrough at the late age of 55 with "The Odd Couple" and "The Fortune Cookie".
The best thing about this book is, that we finally get to know more about the private person than we used to know about the public one. This biography gives an astonishing frank account of the star's weaknesses (He lost about $5 million on the race-track) and his failures. The whitewashing is only minimal: no, it's not the lawyer who is to blame if the ex-wife isn't well off. The fact that his first family (including his two children) disappeared completely from public sight once he started his second one is honestly mentioned. Matthau's health problems are described in such detail that his son was even criticized for his, well, detailed description. Fortunately "Matthau - a life" does NOT contain exhaustive interpretations of his films - read the Allan Hunter book for this - but on 338 pages on which not one word is wasted exactly what the title promises: The story of a man and his life. Essential reading.
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Mr. Chips: The Life of Robert Donat
Kenneth Barrow
Manufacturer: Methuen
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ASIN: 0413580709 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, published by American Jewish Congress on June 22, 2004. The length of the article is 5359 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The changing lessons of the Holocaust.(Books)(Book Review)
Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publication:
Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: American Jewish Congress
Volume: 53
Issue: 3-4
Page: 267(12)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Katharina Schutz Zell (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions)
Elsie Anne McKee , and
Katharina Schutz Zell
Manufacturer: Brill Academic Pub
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 9004111255 |
Book Description
In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this completely new translation—presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor—Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Philosophy of Modern Music (1980), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975) with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory (Minnesota, 1997). Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory.
Customer Reviews:
Adorno at his absolute finest.......2006-08-05
Perhaps the only things more polemical than Adorno's critique of Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the reactions that followed. Unfortunately, many people still assume that they understand Adorno's views and arguments concerning these two composers. The reductionist tendency to simplify Adorno's view to "Schoenberg good, Stravinsky bad" shows just who has and who hasn't actually read this book. It is never so simple. Adorno is frequently critical of Schoenberg in very perceptive ways. Of course there's no mistaking who Adorno favors, but to consider this book as a good-vs-evil study is far too limiting. Not only is this a great study of the then current state of musical thought, it is also an interesting overview of twelve tone music, how it works, what it seeks to do, and why it's important.
The format of the book is especially nice. Adorno's favored paratactical prose style can be incredibly difficult when multi-page paragraphs begin to accumulate. For the most part in Philosophy of New Music, each new paragraph is marked by a heading. This keeps the ideas organized and focused. Adorno's paragraphs seem to function as a spinning out of an idea in a very fluid manner and the length of his sections are just the right length to allow the reader to comfortably follow him without getting bogged down. His theses is developed piece by piece, but clearly dividing up the ideas helps the reader see the logical progression. Having read other Adorno writings, I found this to be unusually clear and concise. I wonder how much more useful Aesthetic Theory would be if he had used this structure.
The remarkable clarity is probably due, to a large extent, to Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation. I've read many other translators with varying degrees of success (Ashton's attempt at Negative Dialectics being one of the worst), but Hullot-Kentor is by far the best. Adorno's writing is riddled with allusions and references that are frequently vague or obscure. Hullot-Kentor does a great service to readers by including additional references and background information. His detailed understanding of Adorno's complicated thought is evident in every sentence. Reading Adorno has, to me at least, never been so straightforward.
In addition to the translation, Hullot-Kentor provides an excellent foreword providing both a context and an overview of what is inside. His description of the translation process is, as always, interesting. Hullot-Kentor has found a way to provide very readable English translations while maintaining Adorno's linguistic artistry.
It's Adorno, less than 5 stars would be Sacrilege .......2006-06-25
Bought this yesterday with my father's day gift certificate. Went here to see what others had thought of it and was surprised to see no review posted yet! What gives? Are you guys sleeping on the job?
The translators preface by Robert Hullot-Kentor who also did Aesthetic Theory is vintage translator expressing the torments of trying to merge two different worlds. I enjoyed it and know just what he means. Quine is right about that. But it is harsh! RH-K is a believer in Adorno and what Adorno says in the text. Does one have to empathize with a text to translate it well just as a musician must be in the mood of the music to express that mood? I wonder. Maybe so.
Adorno gave these guys grief. I am sure it applies to our music as well. I read this not simply thinking of the "new music" but the continuing type and wonder if we can associate the trite with the sensuous and the good with the abstract? But then what makes the good so good? Reading on....
Book Description
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and--more than any other subject--music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.
Customer Reviews:
Required reading for anyone interested in art music.......2007-07-08
Finally, Adorno's major writings on music are available in a single, handsome volume with expert translations, copious footnotes from the editor, and illuminating editorial introductions. This collection contains the most important and influential essays and although it's not complete, this is probably the only Adorno collection a music student/scholar will need. Of course no musicologist should be without certain books such as "The Philosophy of New Music", but as far as the essays go, this is the big one. I've read some from "Sound Figures" and "Quasi una fantasia" and they're great, but I'd recommend them for hardcore Adorno fanatics or specialists only.
For the most part, the translations are very readable. They may not always achieve the level of Robert Hullot-Kentor's beautiful translations, but they straighten out the dense German prose and provide a good degree of specificity. Adorno is difficult enough without having to deal with awkward wordings. Susan Gillespie has done a great service for readers everywhere.
If you're looking at this, you probably know you're getting into and what to expect. This is essential reading - everyone involved in music should be required to read at least a few of these essays.
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Composing for the Films (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers)
Hanns Eisler , and
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0826480160 |
Customer Reviews:
Adorno/Eisler.......2007-03-08
This is a great book. While it was written over 60 years ago, it is still very applicable to today. It's worth the investment.
Book Description
Theodor W. Adorno broached key questions about the role of music in contemporary society and argued that it affected consciousness and was a means of social management and control. Asserting that music sociology can be greatly enriched by returning to Adorno's focus on music as a dynamic medium of social life, this book considers cognition, the emotions and music as a management device.
Customer Reviews:
DeNora's take on Adorno .......2006-08-12
While DeNora - in true Adronian style - keeps a dialectically critical distance to Adorno's writings, she pulls off a sound overture of his output, but also executes a sophisticated theoretical extrapolation of Adorno's concerns grounded in empirically interpretative case studies. Overall a purposeful book that fantastically contributes to the growing literature of music sociology.
Book Description
Beethoven's late style is epitomized by his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, a mass, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions; in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary. Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning from Adorno to Derrida and Foucault, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.
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Adorno on Music (International Library of Sociology)
Robert W Witkin
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415162920 |
Book Description
More than half of the published works of Theodor Adorno were devoted to his studies in music. As his reputation has grown in recent years, however, Adorno's work on music has remained a neglected area because of its musicological complexity. This is the first detailed account of Adorno's texts on music from a sociological perspective. In clear, non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adorno's argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social security. It was through these works more than any others that Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant twentieth-century thought.
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- real-live document to create art.
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Adorno's Aesthetics of Music
Max Paddison
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Essays on Music
ASIN: 0521626080 |
Book Description
The main aim of this book is to provide a conceptual context within which to situate Adorno's writings on music.
Customer Reviews:
real-live document to create art........1997-06-23
as a composer Adorno was a breath of fresh air with an historical depth, the academics in music still haven't dealt with the implications of his thought, the political and social functions of music are now beginning to be duscussed by people such as Susan McClary and Edward Said. Although Adorno had a rather dismal view of the world his "Aesthetic Theory" is to me like a real live docuament to write music today, and within the mileau of postmodernity to be able to create art at all is a miracle, naturally his marxist overtones are very important for again in music this is an area truly neglected by serious thinkers in music
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- Adorno returns Beethoven,as if the ink never dried
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Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Beethoven, Ludwig van
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ASIN: 0804735158 |
Customer Reviews:
Adorno returns Beethoven,as if the ink never dried.......1999-08-14
Of all the composers Adorno has thought about intensely, writing essays which merged into book lengths on Mahler,Berg, or Wagner, as well as countless articles and essays on music, Beethoven seems to be a high special preserve within his body of work. This is a work of fragments, and notes,incomplete thoughts collected into notebooks throughout Adorno's life which never was able to solidify under one leaf,or merge into a completed work. But if you've read his brilliant and overwhelming intellectual discourses in his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or "Negative Dialectics" or lastly, his posthumous "Aesthetic Theory" this is more a threshold unto perhaps Adorno's working methods, unformed thoughts and frequent postponments of thoughts, concepts and directions to be takened up later,perhaps for the reader to fulfill. Beethoven was the consummate artist, one committed to the musical subject,the continuation of time, a composer who sought to break rules as well as follow them. And in following them there is a liberation for what this allows,sometimes new forms,a breakage of the tonal scheme or creating a piano sound almost provincial yet innovative,as the "Waldstein Sonata". Adorno frequently draws on Beethoven the craftman, the manipulator and purveyor of materials, on tonality,motives,variations, and form in a state of becoming, and makes us aware once again, that the process of music is a time-bound one, one of an incessant durational frame. Beethoven dealt with first and foremost with reprisals, with materials, themes and harmonic schemes we have heard and will hear again. He dealt with something which is already in the world, and his music simply deals with the inevitability of those moments and their fate redemption or demise. Late Beethoven as well we learn was not a state of increased polyphonic complexity, "Missa Solemnis" was a retrogressive act,not one of innovation as his "Piano Sonatas" frequently were. Adorno reminds us of the dimensions of Beethoven's art we seem to forget,as the simplified moments, the economy of means reduced to pure power as the "Ninth Symphony" or reduction of subjectivity as the late "Sonatas" proclaims. The Late Music "Spatstil" was a music of reduction of harmonic schemes beginning too soon as the late "Quartets" the "C# minor". The editor here Rolf Tiedemann long an Adorno executor trys to make the fragmentariness of this incomplete work cohere with copious notes placed at the end, even interjecting excerpts from completed essays and entire works, as "Aesthetic Theory". Although useful I found this distracting and not all that absorbing.It seems we've never understood Beethoven or that the dimensions of his creativity have been layered,Adorno returns him back to a composer status, a contemporary or visitor of the postmodern field as if the ink never dried.
Customer Reviews:
poor translation.......2006-07-07
Adorno's Philosophy of New Music gets five stars. This translation gets two stars. It's notoriously unreliable and full of errors. Instead, buy Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation titled, "Philosophy of New Music" (he explains why this is the correct translation of the title rather than *Modern* music.) That edition is far superior with an amazing introduction provided by the always perceptive Hullot-Kentor. Read Adorno as he was meant to be read. Don't buy this translation.
Still a nourishing display of conceptual power........1999-07-30
Although out-of-print this is an event in the history of music comparable to primary musical works.It had to be Theodor Adorno a consummate intellect that created a new mode of contemplating contemporary art, music simply being the realm he knew more intimately,literature a close second. His prolific student from the late Fifties, Jurgen Habermas once said of Adorno, that he created theory spontaneously, simply within the course of a discussion, adept at synthesizing his thoughts as he spoke. But Adorno's importance for contemporary expression was assured,in that Adorno brought the complexity of philosophic,social and political thought to music. Something hardly done prior, and is only now within the past ten years beginning to be realized. See numerous studies on Adorno and his approach to speaking about music. To read the "Philosophy of Modern Music" is to understand Adorno's departures for his thought is the most exposed. Written in short cursive, aphorisitic-like paragraphs, almost approaching a sketch of a thought is to reveal a complexity, but one which engages his subject. The two polar opposites here are composers, Arnold Schoenberg(representing the progressive elements in music), and Igor Stravinsky(representing the backward-looking retrogressive elements). Adorno had considered the private artist working in seclusion as the highest form of rebellion, of subversion, for Adorno had contempt for the marketplace and how that magnetized and transformed art. Something of the market, in the late Forties was prevalent in jazz and film. Had Adorno lived into the age of computers and simulation,he would have seen to full extent how his thought has been realized in ever purified forms. Adorno thought Schoenberg's discovery of the 12-Tone dodecaphonic compositional method as a sign of progress. 12-Tone in a profound way was a synthesis, a conduit of the theoretical advancements of the history of music.It was both a beginning and an endpoint. But Schoenberg's method, althought quite new and unfinished allowed for all the parameters of music to be defined and developed, "Total Organization of the Elements of Music" is one paragraph here or section, "Differetiation and Coarseness" yet another referring to thinking about sound, as a sculptor would of his/her materials, shapting them, giving them form and direction. Stravinsky contrarywise indulged in looking backward, at the folksongs of his native Russia for music materials to be manipulated and the projection of sound without its deep attenuation. A view that is subjective now in retrospect,for Stravinsky was a grand orchestrator and a craftsman. But in Stravinsky, in particular his early period of the marvelously powerful ballet music, sound is pulverized,and is forced into suppressed forms,usually ashifting alternating suite of pieces,refocusing our short attention spans as required and, all in the projection of an image, a screeen for which the ballet takes place. But Adorno had takened issue with Stravinsky's subject matter as well as his technical means, a puppet in "Petrouska" one given over to a master without hope nor recourse.Likewise the "Rite of Spring" a virgin is simply sacrificed without recourse and we have the human image portraying the inevitability of natural forces, something Europe was about to experience first hand with the rise of fascism. These sections here are "Depersonalization" and "Fetishism of Means", explains Stravinsky's creativity stepping backwards within himself. In "Modes of Listening" Adorno refers to the "Shock" value that pummels the listener and the degradation of hearing into a music you merely submit to, whereas in Schoenberg there is more a sense of give and take,of the music allowing contemplative time. Again to my mind this is all relative, for these festures I find in both composers oeuvre. Still I find a conceptual power in Adorno,one that still nourishes today in the mileau of after-postmodernity.
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Adorno et la nouvelle musique: Art et modernite (Collection d'esthetique)
Raymond Court
Manufacturer: Klincksieck
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 2865630048 |
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