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Sing for Your Life: A Biography of Ryan Speedo Green (Autographed Paperback)
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Description
Sing for Your Life: A Biography of Ryan Speedo Green (Autographed Paperback)
By Daniel Bergner
The touching, triumphant story of a young black man’s journey from violence and despair to one of the world’s most elite artistic institutions, as if The Blind Side were set in the world of opera.
Ryan Speedo Green had a tough upbringing in southeastern Virginia: his family lived in a trailer park and later a bullet-riddled house across the street from drug dealers. His father was absent; his mother was volatile and abusive. At the age of twelve, Ryan was sent to Virginia’s juvenile facility of last resort. He was placed in solitary confinement. He was uncontrollable, uncontainable, with little hope for the future.
In 2011, at the age of 24, Ryan won a nationwide competition hosted by New York’s Metropolitan Opera, beating out 1,200 other talented singers. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and at Europe’s most prestigious opera houses.
Sing for Your Life chronicles Ryan’s suspenseful, racially charged and artistically intricate journey from solitary confinement to stardom. Daniel Bergner takes readers on Ryan’s path toward redemption, introducing us to a cast of memorable characters – including the two teachers from his childhood who redirected his rage into music, and his long-lost father who finally reappeared to hear Ryan sing. Bergner illuminates all that it takes to find and foster the beauty of the human voice. And Sing for Your Life sheds unique light on the enduring and complex realities of race in America.
“Deeply moving… This is a book of great compassion that traces the contours of a single remarkable life and captures that most inexplicable thing – the human will itself.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“A beautiful tribute to the power of good teachers.” (Terry Gross, Fresh Air)
Interior title page autographed by the subject.
- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Lee Boudreaux Books (September 27, 2016)
- Dimensions: 5.55” W x 1.05” D x 8.25” H
History
Fire Shut Up in My Bones
The second opera from seven-time Grammy Award–winning trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, Fire Shut Up in My Bones made history during the 2021–22 season as the first opera by a Black composer to be performed by the Met. But beyond this important milestone, the work itself takes audiences on a profound, often painful, musical and dramatic journey. To tell this story, Blanchard conjures a sound world that weaves together jazz and gospel idioms, probing and incisive melodies, and an intricate orchestral palette.
The opera, based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow (b. 1970), a noted journalist and commentator, takes place in and around the small and poor town of Gibsland, in northwestern Louisiana, as well as at Blow’s alma mater, Grambling State University. The time ranges from Charles’s childhood in the 1970s to his adulthood in the 1990s.
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