You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
drkottke 's review for:
This was a longer read than I had anticipated, but very worthwhile. The print version has several pictures and illustrations, while the audio version has snippets of Shostakovich's music throughout. I don't know whether the e-book version has embedded music files (or links to streaming music), but that would be the ultimate multimodal reading experience. It's the best sort of biography: rich in historical context with a deep dive into a moment of great significance for the subject and his times. No snark intended, but what Adele's "Hello" does for a bickering family in an SNL sketch, Shostakovich's 7th Symphony does for a city under siege and an entire nation in this telling of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the Leningrad Symphony. Having recently visited St. Petersburg, I found Anderson's depiction of the city vividly engaging, and the book provides a necessary corrective to the historical record about Stalin, whose impact on Russia is eclipsed in the modern imagination by the horrors of Nazism. It shouldn't be. I resisted the urge to purchase Stalin-themed trinkets in Russia because it felt wrong to reduce such human suffering to an object of kitsch. Now I have much clearer knowledge of just how wrong that would be. Few works of non-fiction have captured the extremes of beauty and horror as well as Anderson's novelist's flair.