As a long-standing admirer of Carlo Maria Giulini, I found this book a pleasure to read from start to finish. To my knowledge, it is the only available biography of Giulini. The biographer has done an excellent job of recording the key events of Giulini's life and, perhaps more importantly, explaining what it was that made Giulini's music making so special. The book is not particularly long – I finished it in just over a day. It is well-written and easy to read. The majority of the chapters take us chronologically through Giulini's life, focusing on his early life and the war years, his key relationships with orchestras in London, Chicago and Los Angeles, and his final years following the onset of his wife’s illness. The remaining chapters include discussions of his conducting style, his approach to music and choice of repertoire. The primary material for the book appears to be an extensive list of interviews that Thomas Saler has conducted with former colleagues. The section on Giulini's wartime past was particularly interesting. While I was aware of his hostility to the Nazis and fascism, I was not aware of the level of danger that he endured. Under the fascists Giulini served as an officer in the Italian army, but apparently made strenuous efforts to avoid hitting the enemy when forced to fire in a combat situation. However, when Rome came under direct Nazi control, he spent 9 months holed up with a Jewish family in a tunnel underneath his uncle’s house. Meanwhile above ground posters were distributed with his photo and orders that he was to be shot on sight. Thomas Saler is clearly a huge admirer of Giulini. Throughout the book he invests huge effort in fleshing out what constitutes the special Giulini sound. For example he discusses in detail Giulini’s approach to bowing in Beethoven, and explains that the Los Angeles Philharmonic kept separate copies of scores that had Giulini’s markings and that were only for use when the orchestra was working with the maestro. He also illustrates many of the aspects of Giulini’s personality and philosophy that made him such a unique conductor: his humanity, his dislike of autocracy, his complete focus on the music and lack of interest in peripheral concerns. Nonetheless, Saler does not shy away from some of the inevitable controversies that surround any great conductor. For example, he quotes the leader of the LSO describing Giulini's relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra as "hate at first sight". He also describes the negotiations for his return to the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1975, which involved lofty discussions of art and life with Giulini while in another part of the room his wife drove the demands for his fee to astronomical levels. In the preface, Saler articulates his own experience of a Giulini concert: “Every phrase was shaped, yet sounded entirely natural. The music breathed as if driven by the human soul rather than by metronome. No detail was too small, yet the whole was not lost. The sound had an inner glow, with the viola and cello parts bathing the top and bottom lines with colour and warmth. Lyrical passages flowed with a transcendent beauty; fiery sections cut the air with knife-edged precision and power. Climaxes accomplished their purposes without skewing orchestral balances. Through it all, players eagerly and loving responded to Giulini’s overarching request: ‘Touch the heart.’” Anyone who was privileged to experience Giulini in the concert hall is likely to concur. This book is heartily recommended to anyone with an interest in conducting or classical music performance and interpretation.