Ever since reading
Geraldine Brook's People of the Book, I've been a serious fan. She has an
uncanny way of modulating her prose to fit the times she writes about. And it
is no wonder that she won a Pulitzer for The March, an updated Little Women, if
you will, all done with marvelous writing and feeling.
So it is with The Secret Chord.
It is incomparable (except perhaps to the Bible's accounts
of the life of David), uncompromisingly told, and true to the Biblical account
-- but with her own special and inspired voice of respectful and sensitive
knowledgeable elaboration.
A book of the Spirit, a work of re-telling that should upset
some prissy appplecarts -- a re-statement of the reign of David, and the rise
not only of his city, but his vision of
the Temple and his anointed successor, Shlomo (Solomon) -- "his
name a byword for wisdom and good governance through the centuries."
Her art in tracing David's playing and singing of a harp,
beginning with his first which he made himself as a boy blesses the work with
grace. And the ending will make the attentive tear up as the children's song
and music rise to and hold the final note ... The Secret Chord that David would
take to the end.
