A backstage pass to the life of an accomplished solo and ensemble musician, held together by sheer love of music.
The Guarneri String Quartet’s first violinist details his six-decade romance with the instrument.
Steinhardt (Indivisible by Four, 1998) begins with a dream, or rather a nightmare, comically illustrating his fear that he doesn’t know enough about the violin, even though he has devoted his life to it. This passage also introduces readers to Bach’s Chaconne, the last movement of the D Minor Partita, often played as a violin solo. This piece, we later learn, inspired the author to become a violinist and has haunted him for most of his performing career. As he relates his path from awestruck child to conservatory student to touring performer, the Chaconne makes several appearances; each time, Steinhardt is able to use events in his life to gain new insight into the work, culminating with a breathtaking performance in an unlikely and exhilarating natural concert hall. The author provides an inside look at the demanding and tenuous life of a professional musician: hours of daily practice, chasing the dream of buying the perfect violin, the threat of a seemingly minor but career-ending injury always in the back of the mind. But Steinhardt merely narrates this tale. Its protagonists are the violins that enter and leave his life as he searches for the one instrument that will produce the sound he has spent a lifetime developing. He refers to his wife and children only a few times, usually in passing, while the markings, provenance and sound of the various violins fill paragraphs. Steinhardt’s passion is undeniably contagious; even the uninitiated will savor the technical sections for their revelations about the relationship between career performer and instrument. By the final chapter, readers may find themselves searching for used violins—or at least for recordings of Bach by some of the legendary artists Steinhardt invokes.
A backstage pass to the life of an accomplished solo and ensemble musician, held together by sheer love of music.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-36892-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
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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