Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile

Rating:
Summary: Hope the author never gets an interview
Review: This author and his book leaves a lot to be desired. Although he writes well, he misses the mark with his feeble attempt to undermine Mario. Never have met any of the family, he professes to know too much and depends on others and their wanting to be included in his book, in which they give him any information that he wants to hear. He has not done his homework well and no matter what others may say, he is no expert on Mario. He never knew Mario or his family. This is a cheap shot for him to make money on. His next cheap shot is on Lucy Ball, which will be a bigger mistake. He already started on her...

Rating:
Summary: Don't Even Bother To Waste Your Money!
Review: This book is a distortion of half truth. It was written by a liar....and not a terribly bright one at that!

Rating:
Summary: Garbage - Lanza deserves better treatment. Pure tabloid.
Review: This book makes supermarket tabloids look like great literature. It centers on, and magnifies every negative aspect of Lanza's life, and does little to give description to one of the greatest tenor voices of the century. Even when his voice is given praise, it is usually tinged with negative commentary. Much is drawn from previous biographies (Callinicos, Bernard, Robinson) which makes this a rather lazy effort that brings little else of a factual matter to light. The only redeeming quality of this work is the inclusion of rare photos which Lanza fans will enjoy. You can forget the rest as worthless.

Rating:
Summary: A Superficial One Demensional Cold & Detached Report
Review: This book was written like a cold detached boring report....It is a shame that the author wasn't able to capture the "passion" of the artist in his writing. It is fine to write an honest portrayal which deals human frailties but it should be balanced with a better understanding in terms of the "whys" and the "whats" that were behind the persona of the man....This book was written like a National Enquirer Article. What this book is missing is the ability to write from and with "heart," it is cerebral report. The problem in this book is not so much what was written but how it was written. Life is a schoolhouse, perhaps the author step down from his superficial pedestal of "authority" and study it and try to understand it before he attempts to play God and be a self proclaimed authority on someone else's life. It is very difficult to read a book, and care about the subject of the book, when the author writes on a superficial level and appears not to have the ability care or write with some amount of human compassion pertaining to the subject of his book.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing list of Lanza's failings.
Review: This is a depressing list of Lanza's failings, passing as a biography. It's everything negative about Lanza that you didn't want to know.If you've seen Lanza in his movies, you won't find that Lanza here.

Rating:
Summary: A Review From The Eccentric Observer Newspapers - 2/28/99
Review: This is a fine biography, judicious in its evaluations and well documented in its facts, giving Lanza his due and, yet, also presenting the dark other side.ECCENTRIC OBSERVER - Oakland County, MI 2/28/99

Rating:
Summary: Well balanced, but sordid
Review: This is a good run of the mill celebrity biography. Certainly it gives an explanation of some the dynamics of Lanza's life from a medical and psychiatric background and actually makes it more sympathetic to them. In fact, the Lanzas' lives, complicated by mental illness and substance addiction, were very tragic. On the other hand, the author could have expanded his list of sources. This limitation is my primary objection to the book. I must say I am very surprised by the virtulant response to this book because much of this was already known and published, and Lanza, like most of us, did not lead a perfect life

Rating:
Summary: a fine telling of a brief,self-destructive life
Review: Through his films and records Mario Lanza did more to advance opera than all the hype of "The Three" combined. Yet Lanza wasn't an opera singer because his career was singing arias and duets from operas. He lacked the ability to study and work at learning roles. This well-written book is the story of a tenor with an undeniably beautiful voice who threw it away because of a fatally flawed personality. There have been other biographies about Lanza but this one is far and away the finest. Bessette's research explores - and explodes - myths that have settled around the tenor's fame in a highly readable style that moves like a fast- paced novel. Whether you love or loathe Lanza (or somewhere in between like myself) , the book is highly recommendable.

Rating:
Summary: A mean-spirited work
Review: Until the release of Armando Cesari's recent biography, admirers of Mario Lanza had to contend themselves with this hatchet job - a depressing and one-sided book that does nothing to enhance the tenor's reputation among serious music lovers.

Mario Lanza was a colourful, larger-than-life extrovert who happened to possess the greatest tenor voice of the 20th century. A large claim indeed, but one that is held by people far more musically qualified than myself - Placido Domingo, Licia Albanese, Nicolai Gedda, and many other operatic luminaries.

Lanza was also a deeply troubled individual who never fully realised his enormous potential. But it would take a far greater analyst than Roland Bessette to understand what made this man tick. Missing completely in this unsympathetic and often sneering portrayal of the tenor is any sense of the man's sheer humanity, his love of life, and the extraordinary burden of being Mario Lanza in the conformist America of the 1950s. Instead, lawyer Bessette plays amateur psychiatrist, declaring (unconvincingly) that Lanza's troubles were the result of bipolar disorder.

Even more problematic is Bessette's apparent lack of musical knowledge. He is perfectly happy, for example, to include (almost gleefully, one senses) the conductor Boris Goldovsky's claim that Lanza was not musically competent enough to learn the tenor solo in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Had Bessette actually bothered to listen to this work, he would have discovered that the tenor part is approximately one minute long - far smaller, in fact, than the role of Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which Lanza *did* learn from Goldovsky, and shortly after performed to great acclaim. "Musically incompetent"? A responsible biographer would have done his homework by at least *addressing* the obvious contradictions in Goldovsky's claim.

Often inaccurate and heavy on sensationalism, Tenor in Exile will appeal to detractors of Lanza only.