It is a brilliant tour through twentieth century concert music that illuminates the history of the century, the agonies of the Holocaust, and the ineffable influence of music in shaping our relationship to both the past and the future.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES, NPR • WINNER OF THREE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS • Finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • A stirring account of how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past • SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.
“Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century.”—Los Angeles Times
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest…
This memoir by a brilliant violinist opens doors to a deeper understanding of the struggle to create great music at the highest level. The enclosed cd, which features two recordings of the formidable Bach chaconne for solo violin, one by the author as a young man, the other decades later, is a special treat--and challenge. If you can hear the difference between the two recordings, you understand the book.
“A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” — John Guare, Tony Award–winning playwright
Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect…
This book is the story of a medical expedition in remotest Nepal that becomes for the author a double quest-- to celebrate the beauty of the world and also to assuage the grief engendered by the destruction of so much of that beauty. Given what we know about climate change and species loss, how do we not lose heart? How do we remain committed to the pursuit of planetary health? These questions motivate the author in what becomes a Himalayan pilgrimage of 150 miles.
