by Jasper Rees ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 12, 2008
A delight for any reader with a passing interest in music and a sense of humor.
How a middle-aged man recovered his love for music by taking up the French horn again.
Rees, a seasoned journalist, decided after decades of musical inactivity to bring his instrument out of hiding and promptly joined the British Horn Society. Though barely able to provoke a noise from it, he was so awed by the horn’s legacy and the camaraderie among players that he vowed to return to the Society in a year’s time and play a challenging solo. In pursuit of this goal, he became obsessed with classical music, especially horn music, and built an enviable collection within a matter of weeks. He stalked renowned horn players after their concerts and even convinced one of them to give him lessons. Throughout the experience, he clung to his dented old Lídl, a limited student instrument that a succession of professional musicians dismissed as beneath notice. By way of explaining his growing fascination, Rees weaves into his tale a robust account of the horn’s role in history, from crumbler of the walls of Jericho to harbinger of trompe de chasse, but always the orchestra’s outsider. He includes a meticulously researched chronicle of famous works for horn, though, fortunately for the book’s tempo, there are very few of these. His embouchure may have softened, but his years as a journalist have honed the author’s storytelling muscles and tightened his comic timing. It is difficult not to admire his chutzpah in setting such a high goal for himself and in striving to achieve it despite the hurdles and fairly reasonable scoffs of his detractors. The author laughs loudest at his own hilarious foibles, and it is his doggedly self-deprecating humor that makes the book worthwhile.
A delight for any reader with a passing interest in music and a sense of humor.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-162661-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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