Word: herbert
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Orchestra musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick...
LIKE A DYNASTIC line that weakens with every succeeding generation, Frank Herbert's latest work, The Dosadi Experiment, owes its prominence more to its ancestry than any distinguishing strength of its own. Dune, with its meticulously laid-out setting and equally convincing set of characters, proved that Herbert is the ultimate practitioner of the fantasy-science fiction art. As the best fantasy sci-fi should, it ensnarls its readers; entrapping the unsuspecting alien in a coherent, make-believe world that he can escape only when the author permits it, with his final page...
After reading Dune, sci-fi fans were convinced Herbert could do no wrong--sadly, though, he fails to maintain such heights in his following books. Perhaps Dune reached heights no author could reclimb. Sensing a mesmerized readership, Herbert continued with Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, well-crafted books but not quite on the same level as their forebearer. Dosadi uses many of Dune's conventions and provides some entertainment, but the reader no longer believes he is holding the ancient, jewel-encrusted dagger in his hand and is chanting the mystical incantations...
...universe with a tenuous power balance among humans, the frog-like Gowachins and the death-dancing wreaves--with their Kung-fu-like movements and poisoned mandibles. Jorj X. McKie, a red-haired man of Polynesian descent, is the only human accepted as a Legum in the Gowachin legal system. Herbert fails to give the legal cult the depth of Dune's Bene Gesserit witches but he still shows traces of his creative genius...
...WHAT WILL give Herbert fans a feeling of deja vu, Dosadi, with its poisonous ecology, holistically breeds a supremely cunning civilization. The Gowachins established a colony there to observe human development. The densely populated city Chu is under constant siege from the desperate people of the "rim," who are exposed to the brunt of the planet's hardships. Their only chance for species survival is to breed uncontrollably...