The enormous popularity of dance and music videos and TV dance competitions should provide a ready and eager audience of...
From ballet to breakdancing and from backyard to Broadway, a guide to all aspects of practice, production and performance.
In this companion title to Learn to Speak Music (2009), the author, a Canadian dance teacher, offers upbeat and wide-ranging advice on why humans dance, how to use different parts of the body to step and spin and jump and how to translate a love of dance into everything from a small amateur performance to a serious career. An inviting format features brief quotations from dancers and captioned paragraphs that provide small nuggets of information. Aspiring choreographers, musicians, stage managers and set designers will find start-up pointers. If you suffer from backstage butterflies or don’t know how to take a bow, Williams provides guidance. Want to gather an audience? Read about publicity techniques using posters and online resources. Want to produce a dance video and need funding? Find out about using camera angles and exploring community resources. A double-page spread takes readers behind and in front of theater curtains in a layout that anyone interested in the arts will find informative. Kulak’s cartoon illustrations are a light-hearted accompaniment.
The enormous popularity of dance and music videos and TV dance competitions should provide a ready and eager audience of children and teens who love to move. (index) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-926818-88-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
In no particular order and using no set criteria for his selections, veteran sportscaster Berman pays tribute to an arbitrary gallery of baseball stars—all familiar names and, except for the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, retired from play for decades. Repeatedly taking the stance that statistics are just numbers but then reeling off batting averages, home-run totals, wins (for pitchers) and other data as evidence of greatness, he offers career highlights in a folksy narrative surrounded by photos, side comments and baseball-card–style notes in side boxes. Readers had best come to this with some prior knowledge, since he casually drops terms like “slugging percentage,” “dead ball era” and “barnstorming” without explanation and also presents a notably superficial picture of baseball’s history—placing the sport’s “first half-century” almost entirely in the 1900s, for instance, and condescendingly noting that Jackie Robinson’s skill led Branch Rickey to decide that he “was worthy of becoming the first black player to play in the majors.” The awesome feats of Ruth, Mantle, the Gibsons Bob and Josh, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb and the rest are always worth a recap—but this one’s strictly minor league. (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4022-3886-4
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Hockey was born in Canada, so it comes as a shock to learn that the first Inuit to play in the National Hockey League was Jordin Tootoo, who made it to the Nashville Predators in 2003. This profile comes as a salubrious corrective. Florence tracks Tootoo’s life from its start up near the Arctic Circle—he grew up in a remote community that still lives by hunting and fishing (“For us, fast food is when you shoot an animal and eat it right there”) and where you could skate on the frozen land for half of the year—and then through the years of league play in preparation for a professional career. Readers get a clear idea of how difficult it can be to be groomed for the NHL: Tootoo left home at 14 to pursue his dream—especially difficult on this tight-knit family—and had to contend with racism and the suicide of his much-loved older brother at a brutally young age. His story unfolds in darting, often concussive sentences that mimic the tempo of a hockey game as well as Tootoo’s agitational, bang-’em-up style. Like her subject, the author doesn’t pull many punches in Tootoo’s rousing, rather hard-bitten tale, which, thankfully, has a storybook ending aimed directly at teenage-boy reluctant readers. (Biography. 11-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55277-529-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: James Lorimer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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