Even those unable to carry a tune will find that Horn's prose hits a high note.
The joyful journey of one woman's life through song.
"Singing had punctuated all the best moments of my life. And created them," writes Horn (Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, 2009, etc.). So, instead of keening on the floor alone when her brief marriage ended and her life hit rock bottom, it was only logical for the author to turn to singing. She joined the Choral Society of Grace Church in New York City and has rarely looked back over the past 30 years, even though she is the first to admit that her singing voice is less than perfect. With wit and honesty, Horn opens the doors to a world nonsingers rarely see or hear: the world of music as it is experienced by those who write it and who perform it. The endless weeks spent in rehearsals, taking notes, doing warm-ups and repeating the same sections over and over again until every note was perfect are just a few of the many behind-the-scene moments related by the author. As the years progressed, choir directors came and went, but Horn managed to learn from each of them, as well as her fellow choir members, on how to let go of her worries and simply bask in the joy of singing. Music is one constant that allows Horn full expression of who she is; she readily admits to crying throughout many concerts from the emotional impact of the surrounding sounds. She also gained enough courage to record her voice and enter it into a “Virtual Choir” on the Internet. The author interweaves entertaining and informative history on many well-known Masses and requiems with her reflections on what it meant to sing those particular pieces.
Even those unable to carry a tune will find that Horn's prose hits a high note.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-041-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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