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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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