A beguiling self-portrait of a great artist at work.
Though the renowned soprano mostly discusses singing here, her perceptive account of what it takes to become and continue to be a great performer will resonate with all those who dream big.
First-time author Fleming recalls her experiences with agreeable frankness, but she favors tracing her education as a singer over breathlessly reprising her past. The Inner Voice is primarily about music, though she mentions with appreciation the influence of her musician parents and describes her husband, their painful divorce, and their two daughters. “Not just natural talent and hard work, but tenacity, resilience, and luck” make a singer, Fleming writes, and she had plenty of all five. Tracing her path from high school in Rochester, New York, where she starred in productions of My Fair Lady, to the Metropolitan Opera, she ruefully recalls the nerves and self-consciousness that once led her to fall apart on stage when auditioning for the Met National Council Auditions, which were designed to help promising singers. But she never thought of quitting as she struggled with these fears, and though there were setbacks she was accepted at Juilliard, awarded a Fulbright to study in Germany with the famous Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, and given opportunities to sing at La Scala and the Met. As she notes these achievements, Fleming offers advice on how to treat the voice itself, on choosing the right teacher (you need an unerring intuition about whether the instruction suits your needs), on learning to act; and, given today’s realities, on the business side of maintaining a great career. Singers, she notes, need able advisers who will not only secure engagements at the great opera house and major concerts halls, but also recording contracts and TV appearances. Her advice and insights are seasoned with recollections of great singers she has known, from Renata Scotto to Luciano Pavarotti.
A beguiling self-portrait of a great artist at work.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03351-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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