An amusingly shrewd memoir of following a lifelong dream.
Kessler (Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate, and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-aging, 2013, etc.) chronicles her obsession with dancing The Nutcracker.
When her husband set off on a three-week business trip to Paris, our narrator decided to go on a Nutcracker ballet binge. She attended performances in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and her hometown of Eugene, Oregon. Kessler has always loved ballet. She trained with André Eglevsky of Balanchine’s American Ballet Theatre until she overheard the bad news the great dancer delivered to her mother: “ ‘She has the wrong body.’ I heard the words “bottom heavy’ and ‘thighs.’ And my throat closed.” Thus ended her girlish lack of self-consciousness about her body and began her uneasy relationship with mirrors. However, years later as an adult, watching all of those performances again inspired her—“I am drunk on dance. I am bewitched. I am on fire”—to embark on her “Nut Quest.” The dream, she writes, is full of the “stuff of life,” which includes “fear, angst, pride, self-doubt, arrogance, fragility, optimism, pessimism, discontent, happiness, restlessness.” To be sure, the author suffered plenty of doubt due to her age, but she also enjoyed the benefits of self-discipline and humility. Kessler has a wonderfully self-conscious mettle as well, not to mention a deft hand with the evocative expression of her inner feelings. She provides a useful vest-pocket history of ballet, and The Nutcracker in particular, and she ably captures the abundant physical punishment, including difficult experiences with yoga, Pilates, boxing, Gyrotonics, water jogging, and hours at the barre and on the floor. Ultimately, Kessler succeeded and was cast in “a named part,” an outcome readers will applaud.
An amusingly shrewd memoir of following a lifelong dream.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1831-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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
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