Also, they perform at the usual school functions.
The group gets together twice a week to practice during the academic year. The PS22 chorus is an elementary-school level choir where the students must audition every year. In this video, Christina Perri visits to sing her song ‘A Thousand Years.’ The chorus is no stranger to famous celebrities stopping by to sing with the group. The school’s chorus is well-known, led by Greg Breinberg, and award-winning. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.PS22 is a large public school in New York.
Jean Zimmerman's latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. Geraldine Brooks gives the whole king his due. Songwriter Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" provides Brooks with the title for the book: "Now I've heard there was a secret chord/That David played and it pleased the Lord." Traditionally, King David composed many of the biblical psalms, but he can't be contained in a single word like "psalmist," "king" or "warrior." He is more than the aggregate of his roles. By then David is 70, palsied, his mind "dazed and baffled." But the light of his power has not dimmed to where he cannot anoint his son. At the end of the book, Batsheba's son succeeds David on the throne. He is forgiven his "love so strong" for King Shaul's son Yonatan, that "flouted ancient rule." Eight wives and countless courtesans produce many children, but only one Shlomo. They also know that David - jester, predator, gangster of love, conqueror and poet - will lead them to a united Israel. They have faith that the land on which they do battle has been promised to them. The language and terminology are so precise that they make these old-world physical facts new-world believable.ĭavid's community calls itself the People of the One. We are told the difference between a dye called tekelet, a blue purple, and argaman, a warmer, reddish hue. She doesn't stint on the gory details - describing at one point a gutted warrior who "fell backward off the narrow ledge and rolled down the slope, his entrails unfurling after him like a glossy riband." I liked many of the physical facts, such as Natan scraping with pumice the calfskin upon which he would write. Compare it with Barack Obama's celebrated performance of "Amazing Grace" at the Charleston memorial.īrooks' writing is fulsome, some would say purple. Long before he becomes king, the adoring populace labels him "the sweet singer of Israel." Natan says he had heard David's singing voice "on the battlefield, fierce and wild, carrying over the clash of arms and the cries of the dying." His harp is one for all occasions, strummed in battle, interrupting confabs with generals, composing hymns for his own coronation. "David must have actually existed," she explains in an afterword, "for no people would invent such a flawed figure for a national hero."ĭavid is like Dylan and Schwarzenegger rolled into one. It's a tall order to breathe life into such a human being, and Geraldine Brooks manages it admirably. Natan has been assigned by David himself to write the chronicle of his life, and this book, so goes the conceit, is the result. "A man who dwelt in the searing glance of the divine, but who sweated and stank, rutted without restraint, butchered the innocent, betrayed those most loyal to him." Brooks initially unsettled me with her name spellings from the Hebrew - we read of Shaul rather than Saul, and Shlomo rather than Solomon - but in the end the effect is to intensify the historical flavor.īrooks employs a regal, rolling style for the words that she puts into Natan's mouth, describing David. The story is narrated by Natan, a prophet better known today under the name Nathan. Both will relish this new novel, which brings alive the Old Testament world of a thousand years before the Christian era. The second craves the resonance of the best historical fiction. The first can cite chapter and verse of the Good Book. Two kinds of readers might exult over Geraldine Brooks's biblical epic about the life of King David, The Secret Chord. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Secret Chord Author Geraldine Brooks
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