A true rags-to-riches story told with fervor and variety.
The 25-year-old Chinese piano prodigy chronicles his coming of age.
Lang was born in Shenyang to parents whose musical ambitions were thwarted by the Cultural Revolution, which suffocated all intellectual and artistic pursuits. He could read musical notes before he could read letters and willingly accepted the pressure from his parents to be “Number One”; he understood that, like other members of the one-child generation, he “carried the burdens and blessings of their hopes and dreams.” Having won his city’s ten-and-under piano competition at age five, Lang moved to Beijing with his father, their sights set on the city’s prestigious conservatory. His mother stayed behind to earn the family’s meager living, and Lang acutely felt the years-long separation. When his new teacher declared he had no talent, his father suffered a frenzied breakdown, shouting that Lang should kill himself rather than live with the shame of not making good on his family’s sacrifices. Four months of boycotting the piano and giving his father the silent treatment ensued before the boy agreed to practice again. He placed first among 3,000 at the conservatory’s audition and went on to win international competitions in Germany and Japan. At 14, he received a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he adjusted to the American system favoring performances over competitions, and embraced U.S. teens’ freedom. Two years later, he caught his big break in a brilliant substitute performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A standing ovation in St. Petersburg, a debut at Carnegie Hall and a bestselling recording with Daniel Barenboim followed. The prose crafted with veteran co-author Ritz (Grace After Midnight, 2007, etc.) lacks the sophistication of Lang’s playing, but it gratefully highlights his parents’ devotion and communicates his joy while performing.
A true rags-to-riches story told with fervor and variety.Pub Date: July 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52456-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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