Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures

by Noah Adams (Delacorte Press 1996)

Noah Adams, host of NPR’s All Things Considered, had always wanted to learn to play the piano. This book chronicles, in monthly chapters, the year that he finally purchased a piano and learned to play (sort of). He did not, as I expected, engage a teacher and take weekly lessons. At least not at first. Instead, he purchased a computer program called the Miracle System and attempted to learn from that. The Miracle took him only so far. Later in the year, he attended a piano “camp” for adults, where at least he had lessons from actual living, breathing teachers. (I confess I am prejudiced in favor of live teachers.) And throughout, his goal was to learn to play Träumerei, from Scenes from Childhood by Robert Schumann. People kept telling him Träumerei is actually very difficult to play, trying to persuade him to set a more realistic goal; but he forged ahead. And he manages to play it (slowly) for his wife at the end of “December”. (Actually, I get it; when I was a teen taking lessons, I was motivated to learn to play the Waldstein Sonata, which was way out of my league! I was less successful than Adams, though I did make it through the brief second movement. And as an adult, my motivating piece was the Goldberg Variations. Again, I had some limited success; I couldn’t learn more than the Aria and four Variations.)

The book is not solely about Adams’ quest to play the piano; he includes a number of interviews with pianists and piano teachers. For me, the most interesting thing is in “November,” when Adams interviews piano teacher Denise Kahn in New York City. Apparently, current practice is to get students play with their entire bodies (“with free movement”), not just their fingers. All those scales and drills aimed at strengthening the fingers? Useless! Even harmful! Kahn tells Adams, “Once you understand that you can avoid the percussive effect on the fingers, that the arm is really supplying the motion, it’s like being let out of jail. You make larger, continuous motions behind a group of notes, and so you overcome this inherent problem of the piano, which is that the keys go up and down but the music goes horizontally.” This was something I had never heard before.

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman (Penguin 2020)

I waited for so long for this book to become available in some format at my public library that I finally broke down and purchased it (gasp!). It was worth it. (I got a copy for my sister, too.) We are not birdwatchers in the sense of traveling to faraway places to spot exotic species to add to our Life List; nor can we tell one sparrow, or one warbler, from another. But we love to watch birds come to the feeders in our yards, and we worry to read of plummeting populations and new outbreaks of bird flu.

We humans are so arrogant. We arbitrarily decide that human ways of being in the world are the most advanced, and we like to measure how close or far every other animal on the planet comes to duplicating what we can do (talk, compose music, make art, make stuff grow where we want it and not where we don’t–with spotty success–build stuff, etc.). Disdainfully, we refer to people we deem unintelligent as “birdbrains.” Ha! Little do we know. In this book, Jennifer Ackerman details just how smart birds are, in all kinds of ways. She traveled the world to write this book, but her most surprising examples in the various categories of her subtitle might be the birds of Australia (where birdsong originated before spreading around the world). She notes how European and American ornithologists had little experience with the birds of the southern hemisphere, with the result that many long-held beliefs about birds in general have now been proven wrong. One example is the belief that only male birds sing (talk about arrogant!). Another is the dismissal of brood parasitism (laying one’s eggs in the nests of other species of birds) as rare. It is not. (And the host birds have their ways of fighting back.)

All in all, a terrific book that opened my eyes to a host of fascinating facts about birds.

The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

by Anand Giridharadas (Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House, 2022)

Both Indivisible National and my local Indivisible Montgomery both recently featured this as their Book Club choice. I didn’t finish the book in time for the discussions about it, because I had to wait too long to get it from Libby. Then I ran out of time and they took it back before I finished the final chapter! The current wait time is 14 weeks. Yes, you read that right. I will write about the part that I read, and I plan to borrow a copy to finish the last chapter.

Giridharadas focuses on people playing different roles in the progressive movement. Some are famous, some are not. Chapter 1, “The Waking Among the Woke”, features the leaders of the first Women’s March in 2017, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Loretta Ross. The decision to participate in the march was a difficult one for them; they did not trust white women not to push them aside. In the end, they decided to join and lead–but as we know now, that did not end well.

Chapter 2, “Can Love Change a Mind?” is about transracial adoption and white privilege, about how white parents adopting children of color might mean well, but they are truly clueless about how their children experience the world. A “camp” endeavors to get white parents to understand racism from the point of view of their children.

Chapter 3, “A Movement That Grows”, follows Bernie Sanders, and Chapter 4, “The Inside-Outside Game”, focus on Sanders protege Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Chapter 5, “The Art of Messaging”, was perhaps my favorite chapter, with its focus on Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive “communications strategist” whose ideas about how Democrats should communicate their message are radically different from most traditional messaging campaigns (but apparently, they work!). Her “call-out sandwich” must have inspired Indivisible Truth Brigade’s “truth sandwich”–Begin with a shared value; then call out the bad actors for lying (maybe show how they benefit from the lie); and conclude with a vision of a bright future based on the truth.

Chapter 6, “The Vaccine Against Lies”, focuses on Diane Benscoter, whose expertise and lived experience are in deprogramming cultists and conspiracy theorists. Chapter 7, “Meaning Making at the Door”, is about Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democratic senator from Arizona, and Cesar Torres, a “deep canvasser”.

All very different people engaged in the art of persuading others to open their minds to another way of looking at things.