Duncan’s star has faded somewhat, and Kurth’s life should restore some of its shine. Fans of modern dance and 20th-century...
A well-detailed if unevenly paced life of the renowned American dancer, who craved and courted fame and earned it even in the manner of her death.
Magazine journalist Kurth has carved a niche as a biographer of trailblazing women; his Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra (1995) focused closely on the German-born Russian empress, while American Cassandra (1990) portrayed the difficult life of journalist Dorothy Thompson. Here, he takes on the legendary, self-possessed dancer Isadora Duncan, the scion of California pioneers who introduced a kind of raw-boned American primitivism (which she claimed were channeled into her by the Greek gods themselves) into forms borrowed from ballet, inventing modern dance in the process. Duncan’s eventful, borderline life, a swirl of love affairs, international tours, and alcoholism, often outpaces Kurth’s narrative, which sometimes struggles to keep up with a wealth of sometimes contradictory details. (Was she a Bolshevik? A proto-fascist? A libertarian? To judge by Duncan’s own words, her politics depended on her mood du jour.) Still, Kurth gamely follows the dancer from one blaze of glory to the next as she captivates audiences on stages throughout Europe, tends to orphans of the Russian Civil War, preaches and practices the doctrine of free love (“there is nothing so terrible or immoral as a virtuous woman,” she once declared), and descends into an alcoholic fog that ends in an unfortunate, but trademark, demise. A demerit: Kurth tends to be uncritical or apologetic when confronted with evidence of Duncan’s megalomania and, more unpleasantly, racist views. On the plus side, though, he capably captures Duncan’s bohemian, sometimes revolutionary milieu, populated by the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Andrei Bely, Francis Picabia, Edward Steichen, and Sergei Yesenin—the last the great but hopelessly drunk poet whom she married, to her regret.
Duncan’s star has faded somewhat, and Kurth’s life should restore some of its shine. Fans of modern dance and 20th-century cultural history will find this rewarding.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-50726-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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