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MOSAIC

Name: MOSAIC
Author: Lincoln Kirstein
ISBN: 0-374-21336-4

MEMOIRS

by Lincoln Kirstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1994

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This memoir by the octogenarian Kirstein (Portrait of Mr. B, 1984) displays a Proustian sensibility in its wholesale allegiance to art and the senses and in its nostalgic tableau vivant of times and places past. From its astonishing, sensual opening sentence (``The pear was plump, ripe, juicy, palm jade''), this is the story of the education of Kirstein's aesthetic sensibility and its fulfillment in his most lasting achievement, the founding of the New York City Ballet. Despite its revealing tone, it is not intimate (due partly to sometimes stuffy prose), yet it is almost always engaging. This self-portrait shows the young Kirstein to be by turns charming and expansive, self-deprecating and confused as he learns that, contrary to his hopes, he is not destined to be an artist. Kirstein is the son of German Jews who penetrated the upper reaches of Boston society. Gifted with what he calls ``nervous energy'' and a wealthy, supportive papa, the self-described hedonist pursues his artistic and amorous fancies from Harvard to Paris to New York City. The strange highlights of Kirstein's life shine through: An encounter with the mystic Gurdjieff is at once chilling and comic; pursuing the low life, Kirstein conceives an unrequited love for a gritty sailor. The chapters dealing with Kirstein's precocious founding of Hound & Horn and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art are oddly devoid of passion; but the grand spectacle of his life, narrated in this volume's last chapter, begins in 1933. In Paris, where he seeks out the ballet, the intrigues and jealousies of artists, dancers, and stage mothers are topped only by the supreme wiles of Romola Nijinsky, in whose service Kirstein finds himself. Kirstein, now an impresario-in-training, courts George Balanchine, hoping he will found a ballet school and company—in Hartford, Connecticut. Of course, a Balanchine-led Hartford Ballet was not to be. One hopes that Kirstein's elliptical ending is the promise of another volume to complete his colorful mosaic.

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-374-21336-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
PUSS IN BOOTS
adapted by Lincoln Kirstein & illustrated by Alain Vaës

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.