Elegant prose graces a deeply thoughtful memoir.
Pulitzer Prize winner Kennicott, senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, makes his book debut with an absorbing meditation on grief.
Unsettled by the death of his mother, the author was drawn to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, an emotional, aggressive interpretation, “clarifying as with colored light the intertwining lines of Bach’s thirty variations.” As a piano student years before, he had not mastered anything by Bach, preferring instead dazzling pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms: “fast and with lots of drama.” Now, he decided to confront the challenges of the Variations. “I had no illusions that I would ever master them well enough to be satisfied by my performance,” Kennicott writes. “Rather, it seemed a way to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital,” to attain “clarity, accuracy,” and, not least, a sense of order and control. This desire for control in the face of sorrow, mortality, and loss recurs as a contrapuntal theme as the author chronicles his obsession with the Variations—their place in Bach’s oeuvre, reception, and demanding technique—along with a memoir of growing up in a tense household dominated by his moody, brittle, often vindictive mother, whom he wishes he could better understand. As he questions what it means to truly know a piece of music, he asks, as well, what it means to know any person. During adolescence, he found in music “a refuge” from chaotic family life, “an adult space where I was fully responsible for my actions.” At home, practicing piano functioned as a kind of “wordless communication”; “I would make music for an ideal mother who didn’t exist, and she listened to a son who, through music, spoke without irony, or condescension.” Now, as an adult, he seeks in music not solace, nor epiphany, nor a “miraculous entrée to higher consciousness,” but instead a “raw moment of openness” to “an emotional resignation that is beyond pleasure, or healing, or anything that can be captured in words.”
Elegant prose graces a deeply thoughtful memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-63536-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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