I read this book years ago. I found it on my bookshelf the other day and remembered how much I liked it. It's a very nice story about a man who takes piano lessons to learn one piece to play for his wife. ( )

Really fun journal of a year in the life of an NPR host. ( )

Competent featherweight memoir of a year spending some time and loads of money on piano, including a new Steinway instrument and a ten-day music camp partway through the year. Regular lessons weren't part of the program, possibly because he didn't have time to shop around for the ideal teacher or commute to a studio, or just didn't want to submit to authority. Those problems, I resonate sympathetically with but the thing that bugged me was: who decided he was going to be the artist and his wife was going to be the audience? Apparently she played as a child but this was his adventure and her role was limited to supplying the upper voice in "Heart and Soul" and being a supportive recipient of his "Träumerei" performance.

I LOVED this book. How come, I wonder? Lemme see, maybe it was an early reference to the resonant bass chords from Jerry Lee Lewis' fifties recording of "Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On" which really hooked me. Or it could have been Adams' casual remarks about growing up in southern Ohio (which, as everyone knows, is ALmost Kentucky), with the jacket flap photo of his 13 year-old self w/ a modified DA and shades - a persona that I once went through too. But most probably it was his self-professed life-long fascination with music and musicians - music of ALL kinds; there's no evidence of musical snobbery here, although Adams obviously knows a helluva lot more about classical music than I ever will. In fact the piece he picks to try to learn in the course of a year of studying the piano is Schumann's "Traumerei," a composition which I don't know at all (did I spell that composer's name correctly?), but it becomes evident in the course of the narrative, that it is NOT an easy piece to learn, and certainly not for a beginner. So it wasn't the classical part that drew me in. No, it was the all-music-is-good attitude that Adams displayed that attracted me. And maybe his nearly year-long attempt to learn to play (by ear) "Misty," an old jazz favorite of mine (and yes, I do know the Eastwood film too). His talks and interviews with music teachers - in downtown NYC and on a mountaintop in Vermont, as well as a whole family of piano teachers in a music camp for adults - are also arrestingly interesting, as are his talks with Minnesota pianists Lori Line and Butch Thompson, who talked of his truck-driving father, who taught him to love the big band and jazz music of the 40s, while Butch tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to introduce his dad to Jerry Lee and Elvis.

"He did like, my dad, to hear Elvis sing 'Peace in the Valley'."

Glen Gould, Horowitz, Mancini, Eubie Blake, Pinetop Perkins, Teddy Wilson - so many piano players and "pianists" are mentioned here that it's hard to remember them all. But the thing is, Piano Lessons is really mostly a love story. It's about loving music, of course, but it's also, at least peripherally, about how much Adams loves his wife and how he keeps on plugging away over the course of a busy year, trying to make time to learn the piano, so he can play this one beautiful piece ("Traumerei") as a special gift to her. And he succeeds. Admittedly, he makes mistakes and falters, but it's a gift that matters. And this is a book that matters too, especially if you are a music lover. Bravo, Maestro Adams! ( )

At age 52 Noah Adams, former host of NPR's All Things Considered, gave into his secret desire to learn to play the piano and went...pretty much on impulse...to Steinway and bought an upright. This book recounts his first year after the purchase.

There are a lot of things that make this book fun. It's full of little anecdotes from his years of interviewing performers. It has plenty of humorous moments, both at the piano and away from it. It's written with an engaging style that makes the pages fly, clearly communicating his love for piano music.

Perhaps most of all, this isn't some tale of overwhelming inspiration or secret genius that leaves you feeling terribly mortal in a world of giants—he's bad about practicing, he freezes up in recitals, he's overly ambitious ("there's this piece Horowitz plays that I'd like to learn this first year"), he can't decide on how he should learn (self-teaching course?, workshops?), he gets discouraged a lot when gratification is slow. In other words, he comes across as a completely real everyman.

I had a lot of fun with this one. ( )