Inspirational, enlightening and, above all, enjoyable—a revealing window into the private world of consummate music making.
The legendary American pianist recounts the many stages of his storied career.
With its soaring highs and sweeping lows, the story of Fleisher’s life, deftly unveiled here with the help of Washington Post classical music critic Midgette, is as grand as any symphony. Now in his 80s, the author began playing piano in San Francisco at age four, gave his first public recital at eight, debuted with the New York Philharmonic at 16, won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels in 1952 and made seminal recordings of Brahms and Beethoven with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in the ’50s and early ’60s. However, his meteoric rise as a world-class musician was abruptly halted in 1964, at age 36, when he lost the use of his fourth and fifth fingers on his right hand. What gives this tale a heroic edge is not just Fleisher’s triumphant return to the performance stage at age 66, but the fact that, during the 30-year interval while he grappled with “two fingers that wanted to make a fist all the time,” he refashioned himself, channeling his gargantuan interpretive gifts into becoming an accomplished conductor, arts administrator and teacher. He also gained renown as a specialist in left-handed repertoire, performing Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand so often and well that Musical America named him 1994 Instrumentalist of the Year, two years before his right hand regained most of its former form. Though Fleisher provides an undoubtedly feel-good account, he also cautions readers. “If my story is about anything, it’s about being very careful when your dreams come true,” he writes, and he isn’t afraid to plumb darker moments, nor lightly gloss wayward attempts to overcome the emotional trauma resulting from sudden handicap. Fleisher’s humility and copious anecdotes involving many 20th-century musical lions, such as Schnabel, Klemperer, Szell and Bernstein, combine for a truly winning read.
Inspirational, enlightening and, above all, enjoyable—a revealing window into the private world of consummate music making.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52918-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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