“Oh, you should do ‘Ol’ Man River,’ ” the elderly black pianist suggests, referring to a humiliating number about the unceasing misery of being black. He has only prepared the one Broadway tune he just sang.
His hostess and her guests would like Ryan to perform an encore for them. Ryan Speedo Green, Bergner’s 6-foot-5, 300-pound protagonist, stands in the Manhattan living room of an influential Metropolitan Opera patron, beside a piano and little portraits of Napoleon and his family. Late in Daniel Bergner’s deeply moving new book, “Sing for Your Life” - an incisive portrait of a young black man from a poor and constricted home in southeastern Virginia who comes to possess, of all things, the potential for greatness at the highest levels of opera - there is a small scene that conveys the maddening odds against ever truly slipping through the cage of other people’s perceptions. A Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown & Company. SING FOR YOUR LIFE A Story of Race, Music, and Family By Daniel Bergner 311 pp.
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