John McCutcheon making stops in NorCal mtdemocrat.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mtdemocrat.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Galloway’s starting chapter is to set the mood, the background music, if you will, which will play in our heads for the rest of the book. The intimate, rich tones of the cello solo soar above the death and destruction even as we remain grounded in existential questions.
This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “The Cellist of Sarajevo” by Stephen Galloway.As I looked up the Bosnian War and the Balkans and Yugoslavia, I kept seeing the word “diverse” to describe the population of the area. Yes, diverse, but at each other’s throats.
Stephen Galloway’s driver for his novel is the bravery of a lone musician who defies the snipers and shells to play the cello in memory of the dead. Based on a real musician, 35-year-old cellist Vedran Smailovic, it was not the first time that music has defied war, or disaster, nor the last.