Rating: 
Summary: Dont Waste Your Time
Review: This biography of Maria Callas is the worst kind of tabloid trash. Derivative, poorly written and researched, riddled with errors and inaccuracies, it can't even begin to compete with other, better books on the Diva. Its primary concern is Maria Callas' sex life, and in fact the author appears obsessed with sex - who is getting it and who is not, who is cheating on whom, who is a great lover and who is a lousy lover, and who is gay and who is straight. Of Callas the Artist you will learn little hereThe book reads like a Harlequin Romance version of Callas' life, with breathless, overwritten prose that runs the gamut from annoying to sick-making. Worst of all is the endless stream of factual inaccuracies, many of them real howlers, which expose not only the shoddy research and editing but also the author's embarassing ignorance of matters operatic. I'm giving this book one star because I have to in order to publish this review. But if I had the option, I would not give it any at all. Don't waste your time or money on this turkey.
Rating: 
Summary: A balanced account of Callas' life and art
Review: This is not yet another sensational biography of Maria Callas. It was difficult to come with a new outlook of Callas' life and career and Anne Edwards hasn't tried to do that. She has tried, and possibly succeeded in balancing Callas the Artist and Maria The Woman, a feat attempted by many previous biographers, but hardly ever successfully. For a purely musical history of Callas, Ardoin remains the ultimate reference. Also, Edwards omits certain anecdotes inextricably linked with Callas, such as her return at La Scala as Anna Bolena in 1958 (after the Rome walkout) when she hurled her lines at the public and won them over by doing just that, and takes liberties with other stories (for example, she only attacked Ghiringhelli at her last Scala performance of "Pirata", not at every performance ; there are other such examples). It would have been helpful for the serious reader to know where Ms. Edwards got some of her more sensational information (Callas' sexual relationship with Visconti, Meneghini's supposed homosexual proclivities, etc). Was she able to interview Callas' maid and butler, Bruna and Ferrucio, who apparently only agreed to open themselves to Nicholas Gage ? In spite of its imperfections, I would consider this one of the best Callas biographies to-date. Twenty-four years after her death, Maria Callas remains the most fascinating character ever to have graced the operatic stage. Whether she did have a child by Onassis or not won't alter the fact that she was an incredible performer, a magnificent singer, and probably a very decent although troubled and ultimately very unhappy human being.
Rating: 
Summary: A big disappoitment
Review: This new biography on Callas is in my very personal opinion a complete disaster. It does not ad anything important or even new to the well known story of the sopranos life , maybe thats because that was not the idea behind the book, however the reason why I decided to buy it in the first place was because in this book the author would be presenting us with a theory that completely refutes the story that appeared on a recent book about a secret child that Callas probably had with Onassis.I have to say that Edwards theory does not hold a single drop of water concerning the secret child story.The book gets at times boring and confusing nevertheless I am giving it two stars for the authors effort , but if you are on the look for an interesting book on Callas life this is probably not it.
Rating: 
Summary: Flashes of interest, but mostly repackaged gossip
Review: With so much biographical literature already available on Maria Callas, any new volume at this point, almost a quarter century after her death, had better be prepared to offer something truly new in the way of either information or insight. Although Anne Edwards is a respected biographer of famous, unhappy women (i.e., Viven Leigh, Princess Diana of Wales), her latest effort does not, on the whole, meet this standard. There are new details about Callas' life that pique the interest: a closer recounting of her miserable years in wartime Greece, painting her mother Litza in even blacker colors than in previous material; gossip about Onassis' encounters with other famous women (I had never heard, for example, of his alleged youthful affair with another diva, Claudia Muzio); and more detail about the tangled web that was woven after her death, when the pianist Vasso Devetzi, who had befriended her in her last years, swindled her mother and sister out of literally millions of dollars from the singer's estate. These tidbits are recounted with enough authority to make the reader wonder where the information came from, since Edwards provides only scanty documentation about her sources. Her refutation of Nicholas Gage's claim of there having been a Callas-Onassis "love child" proves to be largely assertion and re-interpretation of existing fact. Set against this is the mostly familiar retelling of stories that have been told ad nauseam--the feud with Bing, the Rome walkout--perpetuating in some cases falsehoods that have been disproven. Edwards proves unable to shed new light on what created the excitement about Callas in the first place--her vocal and dramatic abilities that made her the most charismatic operatic performer of her time. A plethora of careless misspellings that could easily have been checked (Renata "Tibaldi", "Katrina" Paxinou for example), further undermines credibility when she attempts to address the diva's career. The reader who wants true insight into Callas' unique artisty should investigate vastly superior writing by John Ardoin, Gerald Fitzgerald, George Jellinek and Michael Scott. As far as gossip about her life is concerned there are any number of books by people who actually knew Callas. For that matter, Arianna Stassinopoulos' effort from the early eighties is better written, and if she plagiarized her material, as some assert, she at least stole from authoritative sources.
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