From public relations executive Vaccarino (PR For People, 2009) comes a cross between primer and personal memoir on brand-building and business acumen, built on the artistic principles and practice of ballet.
Self-described as “[m]y not-so-secret life as an adult dancer and how it impacts my life and business,” Vaccarino’s book is a gentle, lyrical pas de deux between author and reader, with specific “steps” such as “Positioning,” “Balance” and “Fall and Recovery” as chapter headings and core principles. Vaccarino slips between childhood memories of her grandmother’s stairs in Yonkers, N.Y., where she took her first steps and gained a child’s insight into discipline and achievement, and her adult world of ballet and business. Her earliest memories are of a passion for dancing; “As a toddler, I danced so enthusiastically, my parents did not want to take me out in public,” and later on, “I danced to the sheer musicality in my own head.” Glimpses of her life’s journey, family secrets and sadness, marriage and motherhood are hung on a trajectory of drawing ever closer to dance and a daily commitment to its pursuit. Throughout the work, tenets of personal ascent (“Our greatest moments of courage are found when we choose to rise higher”) are interspersed with tiny jewels of wisdom, but the connections with and transitions to business and branding are few and far between. Vaccarino’s voice is clear and impassioned on the struggles and rewards of ballet’s principles and discipline, but the application to real-world brand and business skill is slightly out-of-step. Filled with juicy quotes from well-known experts ranging from dance mavens to Willa Cather and Peter Drucker, this book is one woman’s discovery of self-empowerment through dance, heavily weighted toward dance rather than business and with a strong undercurrent of spirituality: “The practice of ballet makes me feel as though I am reaching for an ideal that is close to God.” A sweet meal of practical basics in moving toward consistency and accomplishment at the barre of life, though the connection to business could be more fully established.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936672219
Page Count: 147
Publisher: Cedar Forge
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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