RaveThe Guardian\"Walker’s is not the first biography to hack through this jungle of misinformation [regarding Chopin], but it is by far the most thorough and authoritative (in English, at any rate), and, for all its length, by no means the least readable ... More importantly, the book gives significantly more weight than its anglophone rivals to Chopin’s first 21 years in Poland (after all, more than half of his 39 year total). It’s so easy, when writing about an eastern European artist whose productive life was spent almost entirely in the west, to skate over the formative years, especially when they require knowledge of a Slavic language. Walker, however, paints a vivid and detailed picture of the composer’s early family life and schooling, in what he makes clear was a culturally rich period in the Polish capital ... Above all, Walker is brilliant on piano technique and its musical consequences. These passages are like talk of pigment and brushstrokes in a book about painting: technical in a sense yet free of jargon, easily understood, even perhaps by someone who has never laid hand on a piano keyboard.\
