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The vignettes are arranged according to how they resonate with one another and are organized into four chapters titled after the four elements: Fire (Tales of Music, Love and Passion), Earth (Tales of Appetite, Desire and the Body), Water (Tales of Soul, Spirituality and Compassion), and Air (Ghost Stories, Spirits and Tales of Passage). As the narrator explains, supernovas “collapsed in an explosive release of energy, creating and dispersing the heavier elements into interstellar space: oxygen, for the air we breathe; carbon, present in the earth as the basis of life; and the marriage of hydrogen and oxygen to create water, which constitutes two-thirds of our bodies. We are literally made of stardust. A bit of fire. A bit of earth. A bit of water. And a bit of air.”
"It's difficult to categorize the book as one genre," explains O'Bergh. "It's part memoir, part travelogue, part storytelling, part history." The real incidents that comprise Song of Fire range from the poignant to the humorous: love and loss; the history of chocolate; hurricanes and earthquakes;
When O'Bergh conceived of a book that would combine writing and music, he knew he was treading into rather uncharted territory. "What better way to enhance a story about music than to include actual music?" he says. "Publishing it as an ebook offered the perfect solution for making the music and the story easily available together." Links to twelve instrumental songs appear in various chapters and provide another dimension through which to experience the stories. The songs are included with the purchase of the ebook and can be listened to online or downloaded.
O’Bergh graduated from the University of California at Irvine, where he studied piano performance and composition while performing with a rock band. He has released seven CDs, including Carta, which reached #1 on the nationwide NAV chart in 2000, and earlier this year Intergalactic Odyssey. From 2005 to 2009 he performed with the jazz/funk fusion band Gemini Soul, voted the best band in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has composed songs, music for television and concert music. He also writes musings on music for his blog Song of Fire. He currently resides in Washington, DC.
Song of Fire is published as an ebook in a variety of digital formats, including for the Kindle, iPad and Sony Reader, and is available from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers such as Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
