Acclaimed dancer Soto—a principal for the New York City Ballet for 20 years (1985–2005)—writes about his career, his Native American heritage, his homosexuality, his passion for cooking, his struggles to find a family and his discovery of love.
Now a teacher at the School of American Ballet, the author is not a talented writer—few pages pass before the clichés begin arriving (he was “determined to hit the ground running” and to avoid “falling between the cracks”)—but as his story, a true nowhere-to-somewhere tale, gathers momentum, it achieves a narrative power and an essential sweetness that is never cloying or annoying. The son of a Navajo mother and a Puerto Rican father, Soto recalls dancing native steps with his mother before he was 5. After seeing a ballet on the Ed Sullivan Show when was about 10, he fell permanently in love with the art. His parents—to their eternal credit—encouraged his passion (his macho father, though skeptical, drove him to countless lessons in the Southwest). It was soon evident to his teachers that his was no ordinary talent, and his career accelerated at warp speed. By his mid-teens, he was living on his own in New York City, working ferociously hard at the NYCB, developing relationships—colleagues, choreographers, lovers—and fashioning for himself an record. He has few unkind things to say about anyone and praises heavily his mentors (Balanchine, Robbins, Martins) and dancers (Heather Watts, Wendy Whelan). His kindest words are for his partner, Luis Fuentes. We learn, too, about his efforts to reunite his mother’s family, to exorcise a disturbing ghost and to find peace once his dance career ended. A powerful story, affectionately told, about the demands and dimensions of personal and professional success.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-173238-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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