Nearing the end of John Williams: A Composer's Life. Just after Tanglewood got its first sculpture installation: three composer busts (Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Serge Koussevitzky), by Penelope Jencks, which Williams had commissioned out of his own pocket. They would be joined, earlier this year, by one of conductor Seiji Ozawa. So far, Williams himself has refused to have one of himself added (many have asked, Jencks included).
Far enough through the book to note a few things about it.
The good: For decades, music lovers have wanted to know more about this very modest, very humble, very generous, and intensely private genius. His humility and generosity are far too intensely real to be a false facade, so nobody wanted some kind of unauthorized smear bio; we want something sympathetic and fully authorized. The rare interviews he's done for television and radio have only served to whet our appetite to know more about him. This book answers our curiosity in exhaustive detail, and it is very much worth the time spent reading it.
The Bad: It's an extremely long book (over 550 pages of very dense text, with both explanatory footnotes and citational endnotes, the latter bringing the total page count to well over 600 pages), and takes a long time to read. It's indexed, but the index should have been regenerated, because it suffers from the hardcopy equivalent of "link-rot." And it could have used more copy-editing, especially in the later chapters: quotations seem to say precisely the opposite of what was actually meant, and people get mentioned with no explanation of who they are. And there are places where people are mentioned ambiguously: there's at least one case in which "Newman" is mentioned, in which I had no idea whether Alfred, Emil, Lionel, Randy, David, Thomas, or Joey.
The Ugly: Greiving is downright scathing whenever he is discussing a film that he deemed unworthy of Williams. (There are more than a few such films. Some were films about which he felt that the score was the only good part, and some were films that he felt not even a John Williams score could save.) Cutting that editorializing could have cut the page count significantly, and would have eliminated some of the slowest, least pleasant parts of the book.
And I just picked up a copy of David Mack's latest opus, at a local B&N. Between $5 in "rewards" and $8.54 left on a gift card, I spent less than $18.
And I also just ordered three books out of Alibris: a new copy of Inspired Enterprise, a used copy of Erich Fromm's classic treatise on why some people gravitate to tyranny, Escape from Freedom (recommended in this thread's counterpart on Fountain Pen Network), and a used Bloomsbury edition of the third Harry Potter book.
But How Much for Just the Planet is still ahead of Ring of Fire in the queue. Once I finish the John Williams book.
Oh, and @JD, it's Takei, not Takie.
Far enough through the book to note a few things about it.
The good: For decades, music lovers have wanted to know more about this very modest, very humble, very generous, and intensely private genius. His humility and generosity are far too intensely real to be a false facade, so nobody wanted some kind of unauthorized smear bio; we want something sympathetic and fully authorized. The rare interviews he's done for television and radio have only served to whet our appetite to know more about him. This book answers our curiosity in exhaustive detail, and it is very much worth the time spent reading it.
The Bad: It's an extremely long book (over 550 pages of very dense text, with both explanatory footnotes and citational endnotes, the latter bringing the total page count to well over 600 pages), and takes a long time to read. It's indexed, but the index should have been regenerated, because it suffers from the hardcopy equivalent of "link-rot." And it could have used more copy-editing, especially in the later chapters: quotations seem to say precisely the opposite of what was actually meant, and people get mentioned with no explanation of who they are. And there are places where people are mentioned ambiguously: there's at least one case in which "Newman" is mentioned, in which I had no idea whether Alfred, Emil, Lionel, Randy, David, Thomas, or Joey.
The Ugly: Greiving is downright scathing whenever he is discussing a film that he deemed unworthy of Williams. (There are more than a few such films. Some were films about which he felt that the score was the only good part, and some were films that he felt not even a John Williams score could save.) Cutting that editorializing could have cut the page count significantly, and would have eliminated some of the slowest, least pleasant parts of the book.
And I just picked up a copy of David Mack's latest opus, at a local B&N. Between $5 in "rewards" and $8.54 left on a gift card, I spent less than $18.
And I also just ordered three books out of Alibris: a new copy of Inspired Enterprise, a used copy of Erich Fromm's classic treatise on why some people gravitate to tyranny, Escape from Freedom (recommended in this thread's counterpart on Fountain Pen Network), and a used Bloomsbury edition of the third Harry Potter book.
But How Much for Just the Planet is still ahead of Ring of Fire in the queue. Once I finish the John Williams book.
Oh, and @JD, it's Takei, not Takie.
