A powerful story of day-to-day survival, struggle, triumph, and hope.
A noted classical pianist revisits the horrors of the abuse and rape he experienced as a little boy and rehearses the enduring effects on his life, loves, and music.
Rhodes debuts with a memoir that is, in many ways, a dark, underground cavern only intermittently permeated by shafts—and sometimes floods—of light. He divides his account into 20 “tracks,” each of which begins with rumination about a relevant classical piece for the piano, including some biographical details about the composer and information about the performance he recommends. Throughout the passionate narrative, the author examines a variety of topics, including the serial rape he experienced for five years in elementary school (painful even to read—though not overly graphic), the enduring psychological problems that ensued (he says he’s never more than “two bad weeks away from a locked ward”), the process of becoming a respected classical pianist (despite a 10-year hiatus in late adolescence/early adulthood), the events that led to the end of his first marriage (he offers numerous declarations of love for his son), his stays in mental institutions, and his fiery beliefs about the status and future of classical music. In a particularly bitter passage, Rhodes assails those whom he calls “gatekeepers,” stuffy performers, record labels, and critics whom he blames for what he sees as the moribund state of the genre. He proposes a number of solutions, and he practices what he preaches—on YouTube are a number of his performances that make his beliefs and practices particularly clear. The text is replete with dismissive profanities for those he believes have earned his disdain. There are times when Rhodes becomes a bit preachy and repetitive, but, given the haunted house in which he’s lived since boyhood, most readers will surely cut him some slack.
A powerful story of day-to-day survival, struggle, triumph, and hope.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63-286696-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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