An uneven, sometimes bitter, yet always revealing portrait of one of America's most innovative artists.
A celebrated American choreographer looks back on his life.
“I can be demanding, even mean,” admits Morris, a boss so tough that members of his company once staged “a power coup, an organized boycott” to voice their grievances. Yet he is supportive of talent he admires. Readers see both sides of him in this memoir, co-written by musician and novelist Stace (Wonderkid, 2015, etc.). Morris begins with his Seattle childhood, when he would wedge his feet into Tupperware juice glasses to imitate older sister Marianne, who took ballet, “by walking on pointe in the front room.” From there, the author describes his early years in New York, his male lovers, his stint as Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, and his creation of some of the finest modern dances of the past 40 years, including Dido and Aeneas. Morris devotes much of the book to taking pot shots at people who have wronged him. He names a ballet teacher from his first days in New York and writes, “I couldn’t stand her,” but he doesn't say why. As a young dancer, he studied with a dance company “run by a creep called Charles Bennett.” Derek Walcott, who wrote the libretto for the Paul Simon musical The Capeman, which Morris choreographed, was “ham-fisted, bigoted, lecherous”; he “started as an asshole, ended as a monster, and finally disowned the whole thing.” Some of this opprobrium may be deserved, but the cumulative effect feels petty. Morris is equally generous with praise, however, as when he refers to the “founding women—the goddesses, the pillars” of the Mark Morris Dance Group. He also describes the geneses of his major dances and offers laudatory anecdotes about such collaborators as Yo-Yo Ma, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lou Harrison, and others. Morris once described his philosophy of dance as, “I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy.” That philosophy yielded marvelous results. If only the book contained more dance and less score-settling.
An uneven, sometimes bitter, yet always revealing portrait of one of America's most innovative artists.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2307-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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
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