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I don't know if I'm allowed to post a brief review of this book, but I received the Kindle copy of the book some weeks ago, and I am awaiting the hardback copy also. I think I've read the Kindle edition around four times now, so I think I know it. It's quite simply the most entertaining biography of a screen composer I have yet read. I believe it's coming out in hardcover right about now. I was a fan of Mr Smith ever since I read his volume about Bernard Herrmann back in the 1990s (so long ago...) and I've been a fan of Steiner's music for much longer than that! I love writing and music which bring not only their subjects but their writers to life, too. Steven Smith does that in his writing and Steiner does that in his music. I had always wondered why it was that Steiner received so little in the way of biographical attention, so you can imagine the joy I felt when I heard that these two magical forces would be combining and Max would finally get the biography he both needed and deserved.
Future students of Steiner's music will have Mr Smith's book as the resource I so badly needed when I was writing a dissertation on Steiner thirty years ago.
As you can see, I'm not a reviewer by trade, I just wanted to share my excitement about this fabulous book. I hope you don't mind.
Cheers,
Stephen Butler x
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I don't know if I'm allowed to post a brief review of this book, but I received the Kindle copy of the book some weeks ago, and I am awaiting the hardback copy also. I think I've read the Kindle edition around four times now, so I think I know it. It's quite simply the most entertaining biography of a screen composer I have yet read. I believe it's coming out in hardcover right about now. I was a fan of Mr Smith ever since I read his volume about Bernard Herrmann back in the 1990s (so long ago...) and I've been a fan of Steiner's music for much longer than that! I love writing and music which bring not only their subjects but their writers to life, too. Steven Smith does that in his writing and Steiner does that in his music. I had always wondered why it was that Steiner received so little in the way of biographical attention, so you can imagine the joy I felt when I heard that these two magical forces would be combining and Max would finally get the biography he both needed and deserved.
Future students of Steiner's music will have Mr Smith's book as the resource I so badly needed when I was writing a dissertation on Steiner thirty years ago.
As you can see, I'm not a reviewer by trade, I just wanted to share my excitement about this fabulous book. I hope you don't mind.
Cheers,
Stephen Butler x
I found it interesting that Steiner and W.C. Fields were friends early in their careers while in England.
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Thank you all so much for your kind responses to my "review," and I'm also glad that the responses to this book have been overwhelmingly positive. I was at the last Max Steiner symposium back in November, before we all got locked down, and I saw Steven give a talk about this book. When I first discovered Steiner's music, there was almost nothing in print about him. There was no internet. There was a guy who lived just a few miles from me, it turned out, in London called Brian Reeve who ran the Max Steiner Music Society in the UK, he sent me some stuff, and that was it.
Fast forward thirty-plus years, and we now have such a magnificent book, I'm certain Max would be proud of it. The book sifts through some of the "legends" surrounding Max's life, and makes sense of some of those legends that didn't make sense before.
Steiner is definitely my favourite composer, without a doubt. That's not putting anybody else down, I'm not into that, everyone has their favourite, and all for very valid reasons. And I love other composers for different reasons, too. But for years, I was thinking, where is that book on Steiner? And now, here it is. x
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By the way, about that Newmans book, that's almost a 20-year wait for that one... some of us may not live long enough to see that book! What happened? x
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