Veteran literary critic Booth (Univ. of Chicago; The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, 1988) offers a heartfelt, though somewhat scattered, assertion of the value of avocation. With detailed (sometimes overly detailed) examinations of the many ways that his devotion to chamber music has affected his life and worldview, Booth, who started his lifelong study of the cello in 1952 at the age of 31 (after earlier dalliances with clarinet, piano, and voice), makes a convincing argument for the spiritual, physical, and social benefits of “amateuring.” The book, an amalgam of ruminations, journal entries, and polemics on and around the topic of why “the amateur chooses, day by day, hour by hour, to pursue what life does not require,” is in many ways a paean to the composers (most particularly Beethoven) whose music the author adores and to the teachers and fellow amateurs (most particularly his wife, a talented violinist) who have shared with him the pain and joy of this devotion. Booth sometimes veers into a fussy, dogmatic tone—on familiar subjects like the evils of passive hobbies or the failure of the school systems to provide a decent musical education—which may make readers impatient for the return of his more starry-eyed, crazy-for-the-cello narrative. For the Love of It would benefit from an accompanying soundtrack; it illustrates a bit too perfectly the dichotomy between rhetoric and music, since often the long passages that attempt to describe the rapture of a specific opus fall short of success. Yet Booth’s struggle—both musical and authorial—is so admirable, and his joy in learning so tangible, that many readers will be tempted, as he hopes, “to stop reading and get working on [their] own amateur pursuit.” An inspiring exhortation to those who have yet to find passion in pastime. (7 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-06585-5
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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
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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