Susan Rose Behr

Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story

In 1964, Leon Fleisher's career as a concert pianist was thriving. A seemingly minor accident - a cut on his right thumb - led to dystonia, the involuntary curling of his right hand's ring and little fingers. In recent interviews, Fleisher talks about what followed: the end of a marriage, despair and disappointments, surgery in 1983 that led to a brief return to the concert hall, and, finally, with Botox and Rolfing, the ability to play with two hands. In between, Fleisher discovers his ecstasies: conducting, teaching, and playing compositions for one hand commissioned in the early twentieth century for a World War I veteran.

My Architect: A Son's Journey

World-famous architect Louis Kahn (Exeter Library, Salk Institute, Bangladeshi Capitol Building) had two illegitimate children with two different women outside of his marriage. Son Nathaniel always hoped that someday his father would come and live with him and his mother, but Kahn never left his wife. Instead, Kahn was found dead in a men's room in Penn Station when Nathaniel was only 11.