A well-written, heartfelt, classy paean to a singular instrument.
Sincere, focused memoir chronicles the author’s quest to plumb her obsession with a particular piano.
An environmental-policy reporter and daughter of a professional clarinetist, Knize, at age 43, had the epiphany that she should resurrect her childhood dream of becoming a pianist. After beginning lessons and overcoming stage fright, she embarked on a hunt for a piano of her own, given immediacy here by her use of the present tense. The Yamahas sound too bright, the Blüthners too saccharine, the Astin-Weights too booming. The transcendent experience she seeks seems out of reach until she encounters her soul mate at Beethoven Pianos in Manhattan. There, a Grotrian Cabinet grand has a complex, sultry sound that leads Knize to christen the instrument Marlene (as in Dietrich). The author makes Marlene’s delivery to Missoula, Mont., sound like a virgin being disrobed, a conceit that plays into her extended metaphor of the pianist/piano relationship being like a marriage. The honeymoon ends when Marlene’s treble dies, a difficulty that a series of technicians attempt to solve through tuning, replacing hammers and voicing (regulating the tone). Desperate to heal Marlene and still fascinated by the emotional connection she feels with the piano, Knize travels to New York to see the high-strung, brilliant technician who voiced Marlene. Armed with literature about the healing power of music and inspired by a teacher’s comment that Marlene’s vibrational energy is a combination of everyone who worked on her, the author travels to Germany and Austria to meet kindred spirits at the piano factory where Marlene was constructed and the forest where her wood was cut. Articulating precisely the way music makes us feel may be nearly impossible, but Knize makes a commendable attempt, combining synesthetic flourishes of language with a journalistic attack on the experience.
A well-written, heartfelt, classy paean to a singular instrument.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7638-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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