The perfect first book to read about Balanchine, and intelligent enough to have value for more knowledgeable admirers as...
Polymath critic Teachout (The Skeptic, 2002, etc.) cogently introduces general readers and dance neophytes to the choreographer who reinvented ballet for the 20th century.
Yes, it’s a biography: the author takes us from the birth of Georgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg in 1904 through George Balanchine’s death in 1983, when he was revered as the presiding genius of the New York City Ballet, nurturer of countless brilliant ballerinas (many of whom he loved and married), and creator of a brilliant variety of dances that brought ballet into the forefront of modern culture. Teachout notes that the trauma of separating from his family during the Russian Revolution may well have led to Balanchine’s inability to form lasting relationships, both personally and professionally, as seen by his using and discarding Tamara Geva, Vera Zorina, Maria Tallchief, Tannaquil Le Clercq, and Suzanne Farrell, among others. But what really interests the writer is the choreographer’s relationship with Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Wolfgang Mozart, his deep understanding of music, and his ability to make choreography that “instead of concocting redundant visual equivalents of the rhythmic surface of a symphony or concerto . . . plunged into its inner structure” in ballets that defined the art form for his age, including Apollo, Concerto Barocco, The Prodigal Son, The Four Temperaments, Stars and Stripes, and, of course, perennial crowd-pleaser The Nutcracker. Teachout covers everything from early work with the Ballets Russes in Paris through aimless years on Broadway—which Balanchine loved, as he did every aspect of American popular culture—to fulfillment upon the opening of NYCB in 1948. The writing is graceful, with a judicious use of primary sources, and Teachout movingly conveys his love for Balanchine’s art in a short text that makes no pretense to be the last word but fulfills its author’s intention that it serve as a layperson’s introduction.
The perfect first book to read about Balanchine, and intelligent enough to have value for more knowledgeable admirers as well.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101088-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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