Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein Audiobook (Free)

The oldest daughter of revered composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein offers a rare take a look at her father in the centennial of his birth inside a deeply intimate and broadly evocative memoir.

The composer of On the Town and West Side Tale, chief conductor of the brand new York Philharmonic, television star, humanitarian, friend from the powerful and influential, and the life span of every party, Leonard Bernstein was an enormous celebrity during among the headiest periods of American cultural existence, about Famous Dad Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein as well as the utmost protean musician in twentieth century America.

But to his eldest child, Jamie, he was most importantly the person in the scratchy dark brown bathrobe who all smelled of tobacco; the jokester and compulsive instructor who enthused about Beethoven as well as the Beatles; the insomniac whose 4 a.m. composing breaks involved spooning baby meals out of the jar. He taught his child to like the world in all its beauty and intricacy. In public and private, Lenny was bigger than life.

In Famous Father Female, Bernstein mines the psychological depths of her childhood and invites us into her family’s personal world. An excellent set of people populates the Bernsteins’ lives, including: the Kennedys, Mike Nichols, John Lennon, Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, and Betty (Lauren) Bacall.

An intoxicating tale, Famous Father Gal is an intimate meditation on the complex and occasionally troubled guy, the family he raised, as well as the music he composed that became the soundtrack with their entwined lives. Deeply shifting and often hilarious, Bernstein’s beautifully written memoir is a superb American tale about one of the biggest Americans of the modern age.