For those who similarly suffer, and they are legion, the book suggests, the memoir offers comfort and hope.
A debut memoir by a health and medical journalist about the stage fright that forced her to forsake her promise as a musical prodigy.
Interspersed with her own story, Solovitch provides plenty of context on performance anxiety in general: its roots (both in the individual and in the culture), its history of treatment, and its pervasiveness. To Carl Jung, “stage fright is a primal fear, awakening archetypal memories of ourselves as herd animals thrust outside the safety of the pack. Our predators—the lions, the sharks, the audience—smell our vulnerability and hover nearby, waiting for that one mistake.” It is more common than commonly admitted among musicians and athletes, it often involves perfection that can never be achieved, and it frequently begins with the high expectations of dominating parents. The author suggests that the story of Moses, “who expressed understandable anxiety when asked by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt,” represents the earliest narrative of stage fright, a term that was first used by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Solovitch shows the frequency of its manifestations, from the pulpit to the urinal (“shy bladder syndrome,” more common among men than women), from the baseball diamond to the bedroom. The author discusses her interviews with Steve Blass and Steve Sax, two baseball players who were inexplicably unable to throw straight in front of a crowd (the latter recovered, the former retired). But throughout the wide expanse of this examination is the thread of Solovitch’s own experience, as she prepared to play piano in a public recital to commemorate her 60th birthday and gave herself a full year to make herself confident, consulting piano teachers, sports psychologists, and other musicians who have dealt with and overcome similar jitters.
For those who similarly suffer, and they are legion, the book suggests, the memoir offers comfort and hope.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-091-3
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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