From the moment Jacqueline du Pré first held a cello at the age of five, it was clear she had an extraordinary gift. At sixteen, when she made her professional debut, she was hailed as one of the world's most talented and exciting musicians. But ten years later, she stopped playing virtually overnight, when multiple sclerosis removed the feeling in her hands just before a concert. It took fourteen more years for the crippling disease to take its final toll. In this uniquely revealing biography, Hilary and Piers du Pré have re-created the life they shared with their sister in astonishing personal detail, unveiling the private world behind the public face. With warmth and candor they recount Jackie's blissful love of the cello, her marriage to the conductor Daniel Barenboim, her compulsions, her suffering, and, above all, the price exacted by her talent on the whole family. For proud as they were of Jackie's enormous success, none of them was prepared for the profound impact her genius would have on each of their lives. . . .

Since her death in 1987, Jacqueline du Pre's brother and sister have long felt that her life story has never been properly told. This is an often painful account of what happens when a prodigy is born into a family and how the driving force of the talent controlled not only her life, but theirs.

The definitive biography of one of the best-loved musicians of the twentieth-century, who was stricken with illness & died at the height of her career.

Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) was one of the world’s great cellists. At age 11, she won the most prestigious cello award in Britain and was an established artist at twenty. At twenty-one, she married young conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Six years later, her career was over. She had developed multiple sclerosis, and died slowly over the next fifteen years. During those years she continued to believe that she would recover, taught the cello and went out in her wheelchair. Carol Easton came to know Jacqueline well during her last five years, when the cellist had begun to work with a psychoanalyst. In addition to her own interviews with Jacqueline, Easton interviewed more than one hundred people who had known the cellist. This eBook edition includes twenty images from films about Jacqueline du Pré byChristopher Nupen. Christopher Nupen, in the words of Sir Jeremy Isaacs, Chief Executive, Channel 4 Television (London), “pioneered a style of filming music and music making for television in which his excellence has rarely been equalled and never excelled.” “Compelling. I had always known there was something unspoken about Jacqueline du Pré’s early childhood, here revealed. After reading the book, I wished I had known her before the onset of multiple sclerosis. What comes through in the biography is a passionate and free-spirited artist.” — Yo Yo Ma “A strong, compelling and compassionate book.” — Richard Dyer, Boston Globe “This sensitive biography... helps explain why so many people fell in love with [du Pré’s] persona as well as her incomparable artistry on the cello.” — Publishers Weekly “In this immensely compassionate biography, we learn the facts behind the fairytale, the many truths behind the tragedy. And they’re presented insightfully, even entertainingly.” — Valerie Scher, San Diego Tribune “By showing the human being behind the saintly mask handed to her by a public which demands that those whom it has designated ‘golden’ suffer nobly so as not to upset the rest of us, and by recording the silent scream of the woman who bore the terrible nickname ‘Smiley,’ Carol Easton has proved that truth can be more moving than fiction.” — The Sunday Times (London) “This biography will give extra poignancy to hearing again the Jacqueline du Pré recordings, which deservedly continue to hold their places in the best-seller lists.” —Music and Musicians “Carol Easton’s judicious and well-researched biography leaves you with the unedifying thought that life is a bitch, appallingly and gratuitously bloody in its wanton injustice. Fortunately, the book is also an illuminating exploration and celebration of a musical personality loved by her public.” — The Spectator “Easton’s book is a splendid evocation of the strange world of the prodigy, and a moving account of how the cello was both angel and monster for du Pré — a source of painful isolation as well as unmatched passion.” — Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times “Carol Easton describes the full extent of the tragedy that enveloped this wonderfully gifted woman. In the process, du Pré recovers the dignity of which she was robbed with such casual cruelty during her last years... Easton’s musical perception, sharper than that of many critics, makes the book credible, while her skills as a researcher and her direct-yet-elegant style make du Pré’s story, with its larger-than-life, jet-set cast of characters and its soap-opera overtones, emotionally rich and spiritually rewarding.” — Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader “A rich, full-scale portrait of one of the 20th century’s greatest cellists whose emotionally charged concerts captivated audiences... Easton skillfully reveals du Pré’s musical and emotional development and shows us a charming, flirtatious and beautiful young woman who often hid behind her music.” — Los Angeles Today

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival. Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime. Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth. Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

"Supremely humane.... Kay leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love." —The New York Times Book Review In her starkly beautiful and wholly unexpected tale, Jackie Kay delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind and offers a triumphant tale of loving deception and lasting devotion. The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret, one that enrages his adopted son, Colman, leading him to collude with a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.

Ten years ago one of America's most important public figures, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, chronicled her quest both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public to help make our society into the kind of village that enables children to become able, caring resilient adults. IT TAKES A VILLAGE is a textbook for caring, filled with truths that are worth a read, and a reread. In her substantial new introduction, Senator Clinton reflects on how our village has changed over the last decade, from the internet to education, and on how her own understanding of children has deepened as she has watched Chelsea grow up and take on challenges new to her generation, from a first job to living through a terrorist attack. She discusses how the work she is doing in the Senate is helping children and looks at where America has been successful, improvements in the foster care system and support for adoption, and where there is still work to be done, providing pre-school programmes and universal health care to all our children. This new edition elucidates how the choices we make about how we raise our children, and how we support families, will determine how all nations will face the challenges of this century.