A must for ballet buffs. Not the last word on the Bolshoi, but a look backstage that is both lively and learned.
A sweeping, grandly intriguing story at the interface of art and power.
The Bolshoi Theater Ballet, writes Morrison (Music/Princeton Univ.; Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev, 2013), “is the most Russian of the nation’s cultural institutions and the ballet the most Russian of its arts.” A corps de balletas old as the United States, the Bolshoi has not always been so exalted, particularly in its opening years. Early on, a curious Englishman named Michael Maddox, who had talked his way into the royal household as a tutor and then “improvised an existence for himself as an impresario, catering to a public in search of amusement,” took what would eventually become the state-endorsed theater on the beginning of a bumpy ride. As Morrison chronicles with wry delight, Maddox was not the first outsider to have sway over the Bolshoi. Though one ingénue complained that the Russian Revolution was terrible because it “interrupted the work of the ballet school three whole weeks,” it also brought a humorless Soviet functionary named Elena Malinovskaya, “stern, stout, and flush-faced from nicotine,” to the helm, and the Bolshoi would begin to produce earnestly didactic works such as Spartacus. Even though Aram Khachaturian distanced himself from his own composition, the Bolshoi has since revived it and other Soviet-era works, even if critics sniff that the productions are for tourists as “souvenirs” of “Russian-Soviet exoticism.” Morrison frames his story, always readable and brimming with curious anecdotes, with the recent, newsworthy acid attack on artistic director Sergei Filin, a strange episode that exposed not just clashes of individual personalities, but also competing views of what the Bolshoi should be, some of which may have emanated from inside the walls of the neighboring Kremlin.
A must for ballet buffs. Not the last word on the Bolshoi, but a look backstage that is both lively and learned.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87140-296-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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