This is actually the story from the thirty-six-year-old method of trading between Luciano Pavarotti and his manager, Herbert Breslin, where Breslin guided what he calls, justifiably, “the best career in classical music.” During that profession, Breslin shifted Pavarotti from the opera home and onto the concert (as well as the world) stage and in to the hands of an enormous mass open public. How he and Pavarotti transformed the surroundings of opera is one of the most crucial and entertaining stories in the annals about The Ruler and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by His Supervisor, Friend and Sometime Adversary of classical music, and Herbert Breslin relates the tale in a brash, candid, witty fashion that is often bitingly frank and profane. He also provides a family portrait of his friend and customer-“a beautiful, simple, lovely guy who converted into a very decided, aggressive, and relatively unhappy superstar”-that is by changes affectionate and satirical and filled with hilarious information and stories out of college, with Pavarotti growing as something like the ultimate Italian male. The book can be enlivened with the voices of other players in the soap-opera episode that was Pavarotti’s profession, and they are no less uncensored than Herbert Breslin. The final word, in fact, originates from none apart from Luciano Pavarotti himself! The King and I is the supreme backstage publication about the best opera superstar of the past century-and it’s a delight to listen to as well.