Laurel E. Fay has gone back to primary archives for this authentic post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's outstanding but tumultuous career under Soviet rule: Letters, concert programs, reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of Shostakovich's contemporaries. Despite deprivations during the Nazi invasion and severe scrutiny under Stalin's reign, he composed his striking music.
Shostakovich's life is an interesting example of the contradictions of being an artist while living under authoritarian control. In August 1942, the city's surviving musicians performed his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, in Nazi-besieged Leningrad, and it was triumphantly relayed to the German forces, who had been blasted previously to silence. As an aficionado of Shostakovich's entire oeuvre I found this biography invaluable. ( )

Not a particularly 'warm' biography, all things considered, but informative and balanced, particularly about his relations with the political structures under which he lived and worked. ( )