Brad Mehldau has never been keen on giving interviews. From his low piano stool, deeply bent over the keys, he seems to shield himself from the outside world. After the publication of the first volume of Mehldau’s memoirs, his media shyness becomes more understandable. Instead of sprinkling crumbs of information, the pianist chooses to describe […]
Books
Interview about One-way Trip to Mars
On Sunday 6 June, I had the opportunity to interview Johan Bakker, the author of One-way Trip to Mars. It was a nice interview. Johan spoke passionately about music and his other interests such as space travel. Can you tell us a little about yourself? I mainly write articles and reviews about music. In 2012 […]
Philip Roth, the biography
Philip Roth’s (1933 – 2018) novels are highly autobiographical. His ex-wives and former girlfriends also wrote books about the American author. As an interested reader, you think you know all there is to know before you start reading the recently published biography. Yet Philip Roth, the biography is an astonishing, at times even bewildering pageturner. […]
Moral consequences of artificial intelligence
If robots take over people’s work, what will they do with their spare time? Ian McEwan (1948) shows how artificial intelligence would influence our daily lives in his fascinating new what-if-novel Machines Like Me. The British master story teller discusses advancing technology from several angles and concludes that artificial intelligence will have many ethical and […]
Bruce Springsteen’s compelling life story
Reading Born To Run is like experiencing one of Bruce Springsteen’s ecstatic three hour long shows. The book is overwhelming, poignant, entertaining, compelling and painfully honest. The chapters of this autobiography have the length of a pop song, but The Boss has so many interesting stories to tell that he needs more than 500 pages. […]
Xaviera Altena’s colourful, positive and funny illustrations
In the summer of 2018 I came across an eye-catching Loesje poster in the city center of Rotterdam. I was struck by its powerful brightly red illustration and its positive caption: ‘To say what you think, can also be something nice’. I wondered who had created the image. I found out that this was a […]