Glenn Gould was one of the best piano players ever. But he not only achieved the highest level of virtuosity, he re-invented the music of Bach and other composers. He was not only faster than other musicians (as this is the trivial criteria of virtuosity), every of his interpretations contains a thought beyond the music. This book shows the world of Gould's thoughts beyond the music. It's almost pure philosophy of art, almost, because Gould doesn't want to create complex system, his points are straight. Two examples:
- "The determination of the value of a work of art according to the information available about it is a most delinquent form of aesthetic appraisal"
- "The computer repositories file away the memories of mankind and leave us free to be inventive in spite of them"
Makes you think, huh?
The book contains dozens of short texts written during many years, and are grouped into few parts:
1) Music - about Art of Fugue of course, Goldberg Variations, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Mozart. Deep look into the music.
2) Performance - Gould gave up live performances and was accused for eccentrism There was a good reason beyond this decision, figure out why he did it.
3) Glenn Gould interviews Glenn Gould. What? Yes, his interviewers weren't good enough, so he conducted an interview with himself.
4) Media - how recording has changed the perception and performance of music, Gould's favourite radio with explanation of the "Idea of North" and "Latecomers", exceptionally original radio pieces by Gould, comparable with the XX century avant-garde. Radio as music.
5) Miscellany.
Sometimes it requires quite good musical background and education, as Gould lets the music speak for itself, on paper, by reproducing notes. Sometimes it requires knowledge of this recordings, which he refers to. But most of it is about music per se, the universal language Gould mastered. Highly recommended to all people who believe in music.

I disagree with most of the opinions expressed herein, yet I enjoyed all of them immensely. Glenn Gould was a brilliant pianist, an erudite and deep thinker, and a man with a very great knowledge of music.

He hated the Beatles, yet I think he and the Beatles unwittingly had a lot in common--as cultural phenomena, I mean. Gould and the Beatles were on top of their form and at the height of their popularity when they abruptly announced they would cease performing publicly, declaring the impersonal--and arguably "de-humanizing"--medium of recording to be the true art form of the present and future. In this collection Gould derisively calls the Beatles's "Strawberry Fields Forever" "Monteverdi played by a jug band", not realizing it was created much the same way that Gould explains (elsewhere in this collection) he was wont to create his own works: by splicing together radically different recorded snippets.

Also recommended: PENTATONIC SCALES FOR THE JAZZ-ROCK KEYBOARDIST by Jeff Burns.

Glenn Gould has occassionally been accused of being different just for the sake of being different. I believe this was not the case. Everything he did had a clear motive and this book lays out most of these motives. Besides being entertaining and stimulating reading, the Glenn Gould Reader contains a peek into the brilliant mind of the genius who created some of the greatest recordings of piano music of all time.

"Page After Page" may well be the best memoir yet written by the war correspondents and photographers who reported from Southeast Asia, and is certainly by far the most humorous. I have never been able to decide whether Tim Page's most remarkable skill was capturing a scene in a photograph or in words. This memoir takes the reader through Page's accident-prone childhood, his misadventures in his travels through Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, on to the war in Vietnam. Not a bad life for a guy who once hustled "Ever Retty" flashlight bulbs out of a canal boat in Thailand! Page's loyalty to his deceased colleagues is revealed in his accounts of his "high times" with Sean Flynn and Dana Stone and others who all either lost their lives or their hearts in Southeast Asia... the list goes on and on, page after page.

I must admit that I did not read the book, but recently I saw the movie "Frankie's House" which was made by Australian TV and I think it is one of the best movies I ever saw, only ..... I missed the last 15 minutes on the tape. The story is real, the people are real and the character Tim Page did not get out of my mind for days. To forget the risks while making the pictures, not to loose human feelings, still to care, congratulations Tim James, I hope that I ever will have the possibility to get the book or the video

The Duct Tape Guys have been doing Page-A-Day Calendars since 1997 - making this their seventh year. Wow! They are still as fresh and funny as their first year. If you are looking for REAL duct tape uses - don't look here (althought there are a few scattered in). If you are looking for REAL duct tape HUMOR - this is the place.
Clean and creative. A safe and fun gift for any duct tape lover on your list.

Regardless of whether you are a great leader or are working to achieve successful leadership, this book provides great devotions. If you are searching for something on motivation then you look under the subject heading of motivation and see what stories are available. Each story is motivating, inspiring, and has modern day settings.

The stories are from some of the great leaders of today as well as some from the not so distant past. The devotions will assist any leader in determining a solution for an issue. Leadership Devotions are accompanied by scriptural references so you do not just read what someone else has said or done, but what God says about the same topic.

A great addition for any leader's library, "Leadership Devotions", should be on the shelf of all leaders. It doesn't matter whether you are a leader of many, few, or one, this book will stimulate you to become a great leader.

Tim Page's return to Cambodia and Vietnam is told with both a unique sense of humor and a deep compassion for his colleagues and friends who did not survive the experiences which shaped Tim's life. Those who have suffered through the seediest hotel accomodations of Southeast Asia will admire Tim's descriptive vocabulary and tact. Never forgetting his special comrades, Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, Tim Page lays out some detail of his investigations in Cambodia which did not fit into his outstanding documentary film on the incident "Danger On the Edge of Town". While the American government talked about "highest national priority" from Washington DC, Tim was in the field in Cambodia and Vietnam taking concrete action. Page's work on the memorial for correspondents lost in Indochina and his book "Requiem" are outstanding contributions to be added to this book and the earlier "Page After Page".

Thank you, Steerforth & Tim Page (and Gore Vidal) for making the work of Dawn Powell available. Of all her books, I like the diaries the best--so candid, such a grown-up view of the world; her comments on writing, the New York literary world, and the gritty beauty and ugliness of New York are always acute. Her grasp of the complexity of relationships is amazing-her comments about her husband Joe, her sweetheart, and her child are poignant reminders that life need not be perfect to be rich. Here is the voice of a remarkable woman, one of the most clear-eyed American writers of the twentieth-century. She captures a particular New York moment as does no other writer, and that's saying something.

I am somehow reminded of another great writer, another unsentimental woman: Natalia Ginzburg. An Italian, her work and Powell's are very different, yet they share a rare candor and stoicism.

This book is just fantastic once you start to read you can not put it down. They are two very gifted individuals. There talent truly amaze me. I would love for them to keep writing.

"Morton Gould/American Salute," by Peter W. Goodman, should appeal to anybody with even a passing interest in modern American music. Goodman, who had extensive access not only to the subject himself, but to the efforts of previous, would-be biographers, breezily moves the story of Gould's life along. The central theme of the book is the composer's unfulfilled, life-long yearning for acceptance in his field. At every turn, Goodman explains, from his early success in radio, to his widespread play by "secondary" orchestras, Gould snatched despair from the jaws of professional satisfaction. Gould's continuous battle with depression weaves through the narrative.

The author goes to great lenghts to vividly protray on the written page what, one imagines, really must be heard to be fully appreciated in Gould's work:

"'Dance Variations' is in four movements, most of which fly by at breakneck speed. Gould's harmonic language and organization are tonal and conventional, yet the music is passionate and unsettling. . . . [I]ts 'Can-Can' is pounding and raucous. And the concluding 'Tarantalla' is frighteningly angry. Far from being a simple-minded crowd-pleaser, 'Dance Variations' is a score of depth and complexity, the work of a mind that is hiding in plain sight." (P. 211.)

Goodman also delves into Gould's many and varied sexual conquests. Unlike many of his peers (Copland and Bernstein, among others), Gould was, most decidedly, heterosexual. The detailed dissection of his two marriages (curiously, to two women with the same name (Shirley)), is a vital part of Gould's life story.

Perhaps the best compliment for this book is that the reader is left with the strong urge to round out his or her personal musical collection with anything Gould! It is highly recommended.

This novel, set before and into the Depression, covers Christopher Bennett's rise and fall as an executive in the Balding Company of Aviland, the midwestern city he and Joy have inhabited after leaving the farm back in Bennettsville. Also in Aviland from Bennettville is Madeleine Greaves, who completes a love triangle. Madeleine, the one clear-seeing character, is the most tragic, for Chris rises and falls in a fog, barely sensing the truths of his situation.He is a "natural" leader, not given to clear reflection.

As a novel of business, The Story of a Country Boy rejects any
easy Marxian analysis. Chris is deluded about being one of the
workers, but the workers aren't magnanimous or heroic. The bitter
process-server who becomes a radical street speaker says it all:
he's an unpleasant, ungenerous, vindictive creature.

I admired the slowness of the pacing, the way Powell lets big
changes occur so gradually that the characters are caught by
surprise.But can a man in a such a fog really rise to corporate
power? And can a clear-thinking, self-knowing woman really become
overwhelmingly enamored of such a man?

Powell's sentences are deft:
Yes, the dining room as Tannahill had said was a
really charming little room with its blue walls and
Wedgwood medallions, its little ivory balconies filled
with flowers, its softly lit tables, its hush so
compelling that, defiant as she already felt, it was
impossible for her to raise her voice above a whisper.
(54 words). There were only four other diners as they
entered, a gaunt old gentleman with a Van Dyke and
monocle with his elaborately décolleté, jaundiced wife;
she sat, hands folded, her broken bitter face caught to
her body with a rhinestone and velvet neck ribbon, her
sagging bones somehow organized for the evening under a
green brocade gown. (57 words) pp.241-242.

There's wit, too, as in the sentence that follows the two above:

The couple, created out of much-labeled steamer trunks
and exuding a faint aura of camphor balls, gloomily
permitted bouillon to enter into their chill esophageal
caverns and did not speak to each other, having
finished their conversation at least twenty years
ago.(43 words)

Finishing reading this novel, I wanted to discuss it with some
other reader. I went to the Web and found nothing beyond
publishers' blurbs and directives to my edition's own forward by
Powell biographer Tim Page. What did this book mean in its day?
What were the issues that Powell felt showed the keen edge of her
thought? At the distance of nearly 70 years, I want to see the
work as an examination of human nature, of "love," of limitation.
"Only intelligent women get their lives in such messes,"
Madeleine considers at the end. "They get too smart for their own
feelings, they try to control them and perhaps that's why they're
so miserable in love. . .or they want their self-respect and love
both, or security with love, and love doesn't go with anything
but agony and jealousy and humiliation and pain" (299).
In the end Joy, the wife, misses her bottle of Dom;
Madeleine, alone now, sees what everything's cost and who has
paid; and Chris, back at the family farm, clueless given his
Teflon heart, faces the Bennetsville night "free and incredibly
happy."

Dawn Powell (1896 -1965) wrote novels about her youth in small town Ohio at the turn of the century and about New York City, where she spent most of her adult life. In general, Powell wrote the New York City novels, such as "Turn Magic Wheel", and "The Locusts Have no King" later in her career. They tend to be sharp satires. Her earlier Ohio novels, such as "Dance Night" and "Come Back to Sorrento", are marked, I think, by a depiction of small town life which is critical and bittersweet, as well as somewhat satirical, and by a restlessness and sense of frustration, ...

Powell worked for three years on "My Home is Far Away" which was published in 1944. She had difficulty with the book, writing and rewriting the various scenes as she tried to fictionalize her biography and turn it into a novel. The book appears in the midst of her New York novels, and it is a throwback in to her earlier books with its setting in Ohio, its focus on childhood, and its bittersweet tone. Powell intended this novel as the first of a three-part trilogy, but the other two volumes never materialized.

Most of Powell's novels seem to me distinctly autobiographical in tone and "My Home is Far away" is particularly so. It tells the story of a family, focusing on three young sisters, Lena, Marcia, and Florrie, their father Harry, their mother Daisy, and, after Daisy's death, their stepmother Idah. There are basiclly three parts to the story: the period leading to the death of Daisy, and intervening period in which the three girls are raised by their father and assorted other relatives, and a the period after their father remarries and the girls are subjected to a cruel stepmother. When they find they can no longer take the abuse, they leave home and come into their own lives.

The title of the novel, "My Home is Far Away" derives from an Irish song that the girls sing with their mother. The title well captures some of the rootlesness of the family as they move from here to there. It also evokes well the longing for a home life and for a stability which the family, and Dawn Powell, never had.

One of the problems with this book is diffentiating the characters of three young girls. On the whole, this is handled effectively. The Dawn Powell character is the middle sister, Marcia, who is plain but highly precocious. The older girl, Lena, is much more sociable and outgoing.

The family moved a great deal from one small Ohio town to another and to different places within various towns. The most effective scenes in the book for me were the pictures of many dingy, run-down hotels and small town back streets during which the girls spent much of their childhood. The father, Harry, was a travelling salesman who, for most of the book, has difficulty holding a job and spending time with his family. He professes to love his family, but doesn't provide well. He spends his time and money hanging around with his friends and, apparently, with women in various towns.

One key moment in the book occurs rather early in it when the girls' mother dies. This scene is beautifully told. Then we see Harry trying to shunt the girls off to various relatives until he finally attempts to care for them himself. The marriage to Idah brings Harry some stability, but at a terrible cost. Idah is a shrewish, jealous stepmother. The two older girls both leave home to get away from her.

This book has some slow moments, but it is a wonderful coming-of-age novel and gives a good picture of the rural midwest. It is good that Dawn Powell's novels are in print and readily accessible. It is intriguing to think how she might have proceeded in the remaining two projected volumes of her autobiographical trilogy.

Dawn Powell was no whiner- and as this highly autobiographical novel attests, she had plenty of reason to complain! The story of her turn of the century Ohio childhood, is told through the viewpoint of Marcia, the gifted, plain, middle child of three motherless sisters. Despite a neglectful, absent and grandiose father, ( a child himself,) and a host of inadequate relatives, the girls are largely delighted with their world, which by modern standards is one of poverty and neglect. The book is an object lesson in attitudes and expectations that become reality.
This was an era that discouraged pity, and would have been dumbfounded by modern 'confessional' trends. The attitudes toward children, would be barbaric today. The girls remained loyal to their father, even as they grew to understand his weaknesses, and they found delight in characters that would be considered dangerous and forbidden today. Their own grandmother, refusing to attend to fire safety, managed to burn down four houses, including her own, from which weeks before the girls had just been removed. This is a story of a triumph of childhood with nothing of the tone of the adult looking back in a lament. In some ways, it is similar to "Angela's Ashes," another horrible experience of childhood, that uniquely avoids the subject of depression and rage. This even holds true for the archetypical wicked stepmother, an unrelenting, hateful woman who sadistically confiscated or forbade any object or activity of pleasure.
The most amazing part of Marcia, is this 'game' she played, when she was in the midst of an ordeal. She could reach down inside of herself and become the person who was devoid of reactions to the current stress and be completely strong and capable of enduring the trauma through to the end. It is a testimony, spoken by a child, of the human spirit, and the infinite manifestations and sources of power by which mankind survives. I will definitely read this book again, for its fresh outlook and restrained economy.

I have only recently begun to hear about the little-known American author Dawn Powell, and this is the first of her novels that I have read. It is so hard to believe that Ms. Powell's work has been largely ignored for decades--she writes so beautifully, with wit and pathos in equal measures. Dawn Powell's passion for writing comes through on every page, her characters lively and real, their adventures and personalities engaging, and her descriptions of turn-of-the-century Ohio vivid. She captures the points of view and imaginations of her child protagonists (the three sisters, who are central to the story) with complete accuracy--I found myself smiling in recognition at what it was like to think like a child again. And what's more, this is largely a true story--based on Dawn Powell's own sad childhood, when she lost her mother and gained an abusive stepmother (and seemed to be mainly neglected by her ineffectual father). All in all, a moving and enthralling story--the main character reminded me of Little Women's Jo as well as Jane Eyre, at times. Highly recommended.