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
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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