A treat not just for music-lovers, but for woodworkers, craftsmen and anyone who has ever mourned the passing of grand...
New York Times staff reporter Barron follows a Steinway Model D concert grand piano from warehouse to concert hall.
The main character in this story, which began as a series of Times articles, is K0862. (Steinway pianos are known by their numbers.) Born as a few strips of lumber, glued together and bent into shape, K0862 was raised in the Steinway factory and warehouse in Queens, where it was given body and voice. Eventually, it left home for a professional life. Barron documents each step of the process and profiles the workers who complete each of the necessary tasks. Himself an amateur pianist, he combines a journalist’s eye for exactitude with a musician’s love of the instrument. He follows K0862 through the 11-month process, from the bending of the rim through the filing and sanding of each individual key and hammer to the voicing and multiple tunings in soundproof booths. A postlude follows K0862 once it leaves Steinway. The author supplements this individual odyssey with a history of Steinway & Sons. Founded in 1853, the firm faced some daunting challenges in the 20th century. First radio, then television promised entertainment at the twist of a knob (no lessons necessary), and in less than three weeks in 1953, more television sets were made than the total number of pianos built during Steinway’s first hundred years. Yet despite these changes in technology and manufacturing, the company has maintained itself in the art and business of piano-making. The author’s attention to minutiae makes for a few tedious sections, but he successfully conveys the pride each Steinway employee takes in this storied musical instrument.
A treat not just for music-lovers, but for woodworkers, craftsmen and anyone who has ever mourned the passing of grand tradition.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7878-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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