The chronicle of a passionate professional and musical life lived at breakneck speed.
The editor of the Guardian recalls his months trying to deal with significant international news stories while also practicing a moving Chopin piece so difficult to play that he often wondered if it was beyond him.
In the summer of 2010, Rusbridger, impressed with a fellow amateur who played Chopin’s G Minor Ballade, resolved that he would take a year to learn the piece then perform it the following summer. But life interrupted. Intervening were several massive news stories, including the WikiLeaks/Julian Assange controversy and the revelations that members of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World staff had hacked telephone accounts. (Rusbridger’s publication was out front on both stories.) In addition to editing the paper, writing editorials and practicing Chopin, the author was playing in some ad hoc chamber groups, traveling the globe, building and furnishing a music studio, looking to buy a classic piano, attending concerts, and dining with friends, family and notables—and, one wonders, sleeping? Written in the form of a journal, the volume sometimes resembles the autobiography of a startled wren. The author does maintain an appealing tone of self-deprecation when he confronts Chopin (the piece continually frustrates and even defeats him), and he adds a thin glaze of self-help/inspirational icing (it’s good to challenge yourself, he says, whatever your age), but what’s missing (other than a few words in the acknowledgements) is any sense of the enormous gratitude he surely felt for the numerous talented (and in some cases celebrated) musicians who helped him prepare, the wealth and health needed for all the travel, lessons, research and equipment. It’s one thing to say, “challenge yourself”; it’s another to have the wherewithal to do so. He concludes with an account of his public performance, which occurred some months after his original deadline.
The chronicle of a passionate professional and musical life lived at breakneck speed.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-23291-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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