When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Book
Review: This is a story about a fascinating woman, the writer's mother Gitta Gradova, a brilliant pianist who--after all kinds of pressures and for all kinds of reasons--stopped performing publicly in order to raise her family. Her son has brought her back to life on the pages of this book along with her dozens of brilliant celebrated friends and colleagues. That's not the half of it, though.
This writer, an experienced and articulate student of human nature whose background in psychology has--somehow--not dulled his personal honesty, takes the oppurtunity to explore the landscape of children and parents as children grow up, the motives of artists in general and of his mother in particular, the conflict all talented women face as their children are born, and the nature of performance of all kinds. Cottle's tangential discussions of the nature of art--rich with thought and examples--are more complete, provocative and loving than many books devoted to the subject.
This is a book about art and a book about family showing the balance between the two that all artists most somehow find. It's a book about women and their sons, about the sacrifices and frictions of life here on earth, and ultimately about all of us.