Word: sheean
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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ORPHEUS AT EIGHTY (372 pp.)-Vincent Sheean-Random House...
Wounds & Distress. Vincent Sheean calls his book Orpheus at Eighty because it recounts Verdi's long life in a series of flashbacks showing the old composer looking back on the struggles and triumphs of his stupendous career. It is Sheean's best book since Personal History (1935), and if its prose could be rid of repetitions and the parentheses that break out half a dozen to the page, it would be the best introduction to Verdi and his music in the English language. Clearly a labor of love, it is at once a fine tribute and a history...
Calling the Tune.. Author Sheean is fascinated by Verdi's "peasant" response both to the grim tragedies of his youth and the fame of his later years. The words that appear in Verdi's last and perhaps greatest work, Falstaff-"Cammina! Cammina!" (keep going, keep going)-were already his maxim in his null and he kept going at the rate of more than an opera a year. Verdi hated Milan, hated the power of La Scala's management, hated "the rule of the foreigner and the secret police." But to "keep going." he pruned...
Though widely hailed as a reporter, Gunther is at least as good a rewrite-man. He can take widely scattered strands of information-from books, statistics, official reports, newspaper clippings-and weave them into a pattern that is not only meaningful but brightly his own. Says "Jimmy" Sheean: "He is no mere compiler, for all his massive array of facts. He has repeatedly proved readable to a degree which no assembly of facts could explain. The zest with which he relishes his material gives it the breathless flavor of discovery every time, even aside from the liveliness of the writing...
...home the world's best European coverage. From such resident and visiting firemen as the New York Evening Post's Dorothy Thompson. I.N.S.'s late H. R. Knickerbocker (who once interviewed Stalin's mother), the Chicago Tribune's William (Berlin Diary) Shirer, and Author Sheean, Correspondent Gunther busily soaked up lore and legends that never made the news stories. Gunther's most valuable mentor: the New York Evening Post's M. W. (''Mike") Fodor, dean of Balkan correspondents, who helped the young Chicagoan so generously that fellow newsmen later dubbed Inside...