After about 2 chapters, I thought, "Okay, I can't wait until I'm done reading this." Carhart does include interesting information about the history of the piano, but other than that, the book is really boring.I feel I can best sum up my thoughts like this: The Piano Shop on the Left Bank could have been Joe's Mechanic Shop on the East Side. The story in this book seemed analogous to a story about a guy searching for his dream car and recalling personal and "deep" anecdotes along the way. Yes, a piano is unique in many ways, but I don't think Carhart writing 268 pages about this uniqueness was justified. It could have been rewritten as a short story, with all of the interesting facts about tuning, piano history, etc. in an appendix.Again, the entire time I was reading this, I was anxious to finish it because it was so boring.