"The second volume of Walsh's remarkably thorough two-part biography begins with Stravinsky arriving in America—his European roots severed by the Second World War and the deaths of his mother, his wife, and his elder daughter—bringing with him a longtime mistress and a neoclassical style that soon goes out of fashion. The story gathers strength with the entry, in the late 1940s, of Robert Craft, a young conductor of overpowering ambition. Craft made Stravinsky's later works possible, patiently introducing him to 12-tone music, and eventually became such an intimate that a breach with Stravinsky's children was inevitable. Negotiating the ensuing web of lawsuits, wounded egos, and tax-avoidance schemes, Walsh, an academic musicologist who writes with the verve of a first-rate critic, never loses sight of the incandescent figure at its center, a man whose supposedly inexpressive music became "the best response to those terrifying years that brought it into being."—The New Yorker