Villella was a star among stars, the athletic all-American boy of the New York City Ballet from the late 1950's through the 70's. His career spanned ``a golden age of ballet, an amazing era in which George Balanchine single-handedly transformed the art. I watched him do it. I was part of it all.'' Villella's account of those years is as straightforward and forthright as this dancer himself. Villella followed his sister into ballet classes at age nine- -risky business for a boy in Bayside, Queens. A year later, he was accepted into the School of American Ballet, NYCB's training ground. Villella went on to spend his entire performing career with NYCB and Balanchine. At his parents' insistence, he left dance for four years to complete a bachelor's degree—a hiatus that had physical ramifications for the rest of his career. However, those years ``gave me another perspective on dancing and kept me from becoming too ascetic and pretentious.'' And certainly Villella held himself apart from most of the company; without rancor, he additionally attributes this to his short stature (5`8'') and consequent need to fight for new roles, his heterosexuality, and his eternally difficult relationship with Balanchine. The two never had an open, relaxed relationship: ``I was unusually tongue-tied around him....He made me uncomfortable because he was so sure of himself and his art.'' Villella's decision not to take Balanchine's famous—and peculiar—classes because he found them physically destructive further distanced him: ``Until his dying day I don't think he forgave me for not praying at his altar.'' There are plenty of sidelights here as well: tales of tours, other dancers, company intrigues. And Villella gives a complete account of his devastating, career-ending injuries, as well as of how he found his way to be the phenomenally successful artistic director of the Miami City Ballet. Throughout, Villella appears as his immensely talented, intelligent, self-absorbed, and opinionated self: a cleareyed account of a most remarkable career in a remarkable time. (Thirty- two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-72370-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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