Music is an airy, abstract art, yet every note is grounded in history and in the earth. Jeremy Eichler, one of our finest writers on music, captures that duality supremely well in Time's Echo, his eagerly awaited first book. Delving into twentieth-century musical memorials by Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich, Eichler evokes not only the smoldering power of the music but also the haunted lives and places from which these masterpieces sprang. It is a work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling. - Alex Ross
Jeremy Eichler is an award-winning critic, essayist, and cultural historian. A Public Scholar grantee of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has worked as a music critic for The New York Times and, since 2006, has served as chief classical music critic of the Boston Globe. His writing -- which has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Washington Post -- has been recognized with a fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism. He lives in Boston.