The light and the dark fight it out in this fierce, fiery memoir.
Can music save a person’s life?
For professional oboist Butler, the answer is yes. Her brutally honest memoir recounts the life of a woman who was able to overcome devastating emotional and physical pain, sometimes self-inflicted, thanks to the music she loved and performed. Her father was a creepy and violent man who once smashed her sister’s face with a brutal punch. He haunts this book, while the author’s mother comes across as weak, quiet, and passive in the background. There seemed to be little love in the household. However, there was music, and Butler grabbed on to it like a life raft. As a 4-year-old, she was mesmerized by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and singer Kirsten Flagstad. Butler picked up the flute in fourth grade and later, when her music teacher asked for a volunteer to play a new instrument, she took on the oboe. The music and hours of practice were always there for her when her parents weren’t. The book proceeds chronologically, with many italicized chapters interspersed. These are mainly about music and performing and her favorite composers, and they’re a welcome respite from the pain of her personal story. Eventually, Butler got into a conservatory in New York City and worked odd jobs to survive. Her low self-esteem and unrelenting search for a new father figure led to a failed marriage, abusive boyfriends, drugs, and even a suicide attempt. But there was always the music, and she writes lovingly and beautifully about it. She tells us about making reeds for her oboe, why many conductors aren’t worth their salt, how difficult and “glorious” it is to work as a freelance musician with great composers (André Watts, Keith Jarrett), and the utter joy of performing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which “tests the endurance of all oboists.”
The light and the dark fight it out in this fierce, fiery memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39228-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
For the author’s fans.
A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”
The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–in-training and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness…in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.
For the author’s fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42745-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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