Book Blurbs

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier
by Thad Carhart, JD '77
Random House, 2001; $23.95 (memoir/music).

It seemed innocuous enough. "I had been toying with the idea of buying a piano," recounts Carhart, a freelance writer who lives in Paris. But doing business with Desforges Pianos turned out to be more than a simple transaction: the inscrutable shopowner wouldn't take just anyone for a customer. In this memoir, Carhart chronicles both how he managed to "earn" his "plucky" Stingl grand and the friendships forged as he resumed piano lessons and gained an entrée into the "closed world" of the bohemian Left Bank. Along the way, he offers nuggets about the instrument's history, mechanics and tuning. About rediscovering the piano, he writes: "its satisfactions were limitless, its impact on my life profound."

Navigating the Darwin Straits
by Edith Forbes, '78,
MA '78
Seal Press, 2001;
$13.95 (fiction).

Forbes's fourth novel chronicles Jordy McNeil's first 25 or so years, from childhood with a lesbian mother in a tiny Midwestern town to his desperate search for a purpose after striking it rich in Silicon Valley's dot-com boom. Her prose is simple and engaging; and every now and then, she tosses in a stop-and-think phrase: "it's no wonder the human race has spread over the entire globe, because we're the species that can create normalcy out of any situation, play checkers in an air raid shelter or take our cat to the South Pole." Jordy's suffering is easy to relate to, caused not by crushing hardship but by the caprices and mundanity of an ordinary existence.

The Human Side of Dyslexia
by Shirley Kurnoff, MA '95
www.dyslexia.com/saa.
html, 2000;
$18 (self-help).

The author, whose adult daughter is dyslexic, found most books on learning disabilities to be dry and clinical. So she put together--in e-book form--the resource she wished she'd had years ago. It consists of 143 candid interviews with dyslexic students, their parents and siblings from around this country and the United Kingdom. Kurnoff says she aims to offer readers a kind of electronic support system by sharing experiences and strategies for counteracting a condition that affects 10 percent of the population. Families who worry about a dyslexic child's future prospects will find the stories of college students particularly revealing. Dyslexia doesn't spell doom.

A Chapter from Her Upbringing
Ivy Goodman, MA '77
Carnegie Mellon, 2001;
$15.95 (fiction).

One of the characters in this collection of short stories always got this advice from his mother: "There is nothing richer than an interior life. Dark feelings encourage sensitivity." Goodman homes in on those dark interiors to depict diverse individuals in unsettling, and often haunting, situations. A middle-aged man starving himself to death fantasizes about an emaciated stranger. An exhausted new mother wanders into a graveyard and dreams of burying herself. A tyrannical old woman torments her grandson and feels no remorse. Goodman's portrayals evoke the isolation and loneliness of modern society. But her switches in narrative perspective, unconventional descriptions and the often-unfinished quality of these stories constantly surprise the reader.