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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
