You'd expect the story of a half-bit classical concert pianist to be as funny as the music he plays. Yet for fifteen years, until he hung up his tails at age forty, the laughs never stopped in Taussig's career, on and off the stage, whether in the backwoods of Canada or eventually in the company of world leaders traveling to exotic locales around the world. The cards were stacked against him when he arrived penniless in a country whose language he...