Tag Archives: biography
Churchill: Walking with Destiny – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th July 2023Author Andrew Roberts has the industry of a worker bee mixed with the allure of a rare butterfly. He turns out historical biographies like lava from an active volcano. His one volume biography of Churchill, a very big one volume comprising 1152 pages, was published in 2018 and is the definitive account of the great…
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Maverick – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 13th October 2021Jason Riley is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Maverick, is an intellectual biography of the economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell. Focusing mainly on Sowell’s thinking, it presents only the bare facts of his life. Sowell has averaged about…
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Donald Seldin – The Maestro of Medicine
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th October 2020Raymond Greenberg’s new biography of the late Donald Seldin has a great subtitle. It could also have been Never at Rest had not Richard Westfall preopted the title for his definitive biography of Isaac Newton. Constant purposeful activity combined with a blazing intellect was the dominant characteristic of Seldin’s long and incredibly productive life. A…
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Giuseppe Di Stefano Video
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th November 2019Below is a video made by the late tenor shortly before he was beaten senseless by unknown assailants as he was exiting his car near his home in Kenya. The attack was in 2004; the singer never fully recovered and died in 2008. Di Stefano’s prime coincided almost exactly with that of Maria Callas with…
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Toscanini: Musician of Conscience – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th November 2017Harvey Sachs has made a career, well part of one, writing books about the eminent conductor. Sachs wrote his first Toscanini biography in 1978. Why a second one almost 40 years later? Sachs cites the additional material now available that was denied him during his first go around with the conductor. The book’s subtitle, Musician…
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John Wayne – A Biography
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 25th June 2014John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman 672 pages Simon & Schuster – 2014 Why a new 574 page biography (this total does not include the notes and index) on a movie star who died in 1979 and who likely made more bad films than any other actor in the history of the business? Because…
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William Harvey – Review of a Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 23rd September 2013Thomas Wright has written a new biography of William Harvey (1578-1657) who first described the circulation of the blood. I haven’t read it, but I have read a review of the book in the September 16, 2013 Weekly Standard – Living in Vein. The are a number of ways to review a book. The best…
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Birgit Nilsson’s 3 Favorite Tenors
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th January 2008Birgit Nilsson’s autobiography was published in Swedish in 1995. It appeared in a German translation in 1997. Recently Northwestern University Press has published it in English. But it is the German translation that has appeared in English. Thus one wonders what has been gained in translation. Operatic memoirs usually consist of I sang this here…
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