A moving if uneven biography of a man whose career was marked by moving and uneven performances.
He was the talk of the classical music world, as idolized as any pop star, and an unwitting player in the geopolitical struggle between the two superpowers of the 20th century.
He was pianist Van Cliburn (1934-2013), the “long-legged young Texan” from the small town of Kilgore, who, at age 23 in 1958, was the surprise winner of Moscow’s inaugural Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, which Isacoff (A Natural History of the Piano, 2012, etc.), a musician and Wall Street Journal contributor, calls “a high-culture version of the World Cup.” In retrospect, Cliburn’s victory may not have been that big a surprise. This was a young man whose piano-teacher mother, Rildia Bee, would “playfully suspend him over the keys of the piano” when he was a child. That he resisted the temptation to pound on the keys was, to Rildia Bee, “a sign of unusual sensitivity.” She was right. Soon, he was studying at Juilliard with famed piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne, entertaining audiences on Steve Allen’s Tonight Show in 1955, and, three years later, performing a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s famously difficult Piano Concerto No. 3 that inspired members of the competition’s jury to proclaim that Cliburn had a “Russian soul.” Isacoff does an excellent job documenting suspicions of corruption in the competition and the result’s effect on U.S.–Soviet relations. He gets sidetracked, however, with details about the other students, and there are extraneous passages that fail to enlighten—e.g., Truman Capote’s dissatisfaction with a Leningrad hotel in 1955. Nonetheless, the author offers a touching portrait of Cliburn, a natural performer who received injections of an amphetamine-laced “miracle tissue regeneration” to combat nervousness-induced weight loss and whose nonchalance and lack of curiosity—he was a poor student and was chronically late, even to his own performances—were primary reasons that he never again reached the heights of his early success.
A moving if uneven biography of a man whose career was marked by moving and uneven performances.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35218-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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