In 1939 at Marion Anderson's great protest concert in Washington, a German-Jewish emigre physicist and a young black contralto are brought together by concern over a lost child. They eventually marry and have three children, bringing them up in a hot-house atmosphere of music and maths, hoping to raise them to have no awareness of race as an issue in their lives. All three are musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only ...
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In 1939 at Marion Anderson's great protest concert in Washington, a German-Jewish emigre physicist and a young black contralto are brought together by concern over a lost child. They eventually marry and have three children, bringing them up in a hot-house atmosphere of music and maths, hoping to raise them to have no awareness of race as an issue in their lives. All three are musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only accept him as a 'brilliant Negro singer'; Joseph, our narrator, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth turns her back on classical music ('white music') and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther. Powers brilliantly and devastatingly delineates the tragedy of race in America, as it unfolds from the Civil Rights movement to Rodney King and Louis Farrakhan, through the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities. This is a hugely ambitious - and brilliantly achieved - novel, as brilliantly clever as Powers' previous novels, but also deeply political and deeply moving.
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Add this copy of The Time of Our Singing to cart. $1.95, good condition, Sold by SRJCLIB1 rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Santa Rosa, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Picador USA.
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Richard Powers bites off a big piece of American civil rights history. Through the eyes of two biracial musically gifted boys, we see how race matters. Powers gives us an intimate family setting to explore parenting, education, societal convention, physics, music and love. Well done!
Kiamiko
Sep 1, 2008
Power Thriumphs with Time
A complete stranger recommend that i read this book and forever I will be in debt to him. How to describe a book of such richness. First anyone with a passion for race, time, identity or even Einstein's Theory of Relativity, should pick up this book. Mr Powers has the gift of composing words that make a lasting sounds in our minds. The song, the melody, or the story, if you like, plays something like this - A German physicist meets a black singer at the Marian Anderson concert in Washington DC in 1941, they fall in love, marry and have children. Caught in a time when society is too helpless and inept to accept their relationship or their children the couple decides to create their own customs based on their love of music. What follows is a continuous, unified, and evocative composition of words, with all the melody, harmony, rhythm, one needs. This is a story not to be missed!
