More silver spoon than strife in this indulgent memoir.
A privileged Australian classical pianist chronicles her love of music and the delicate student-teacher dynamic that honed her craft.
Growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s, Goldsworthy began studying piano at age six, taking lessons from a jazz musician. Three years later, her grandfather enlisted the assistance of Eleonora Sivan, a distinguished Russian instructor formerly with the Leningrad Conservatorium of Music. Initially perceiving piano pieces as “obstacle courses for fingers, in which the object was getting through to the end, largely unscathed,” the author found Sivan’s demand that she practice two hours per day a daunting task. Goldsworthy’s first dream was to be a singer, but Sivan proved to be a pedagogue whose intensive musical knowledge and sage (often overbearing) instruction, imparted via broken English, successfully nurtured and matured her. Being receptive to the intellectual depth of Bach as well as to Mozart’s simplicity, the author’s burgeoning musical talent developed swiftly from intensive lessons and musical theory to adjudicatory examinations at conservatoriums, while her parents, both prominent doctors, beamed with pride. As an adolescent, the author admits to becoming flummoxed by the life choices presented to her—e.g., would peers consider her a “square” for being smart and playing piano?—and eschewed boys in favor of music (“Boyfriends. Who needed such trifles? I had the piano as my lover”). Awards, recitals and an air of self-congratulatory bliss dominate the third section of the memoir as she, at age 18, glows in the company of awestruck professional musicians. Consistently guided by Sivan’s tutelage, the author ascended further still, though car accidents and a melodic misfire or two threatened to derail her fame. Goldsworthy often takes time out of her own story to mention her father and his accomplishments as a published author and doctor. However, the author’s overabundance of self-love and melodrama often stifles the narrative, as when, after a performance blunder at the Sydney Opera House she “climbed the steps to the top of the opera house, where I assumed a tragic, windswept pose.”
More silver spoon than strife in this indulgent memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-64628-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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