Eye-opening, riveting, enlightening, uplifting—Martha Graham's life and times seen through the discerning, appreciative eye of Agnes de Mille. This is an earthier, more human Graham than in her own Blood Memory (p. 839); it is also a more detailed look at the era. Graham's vision was so focused that she was unaware of, or thought unimportant, the surroundings, players, intrigues; she was also extremely private. De Mille can and does give us the fuller picture. De Mille met Graham in the early Denishawn days in California; their lives and careers intertwined ever after with varying degrees of intensity. They were friends, worked with many of the same people, and kept a critical eye on each other's work. Graham's strength and will were apparent certainly by her teens; her genius was apparent early, too. De Mille follows the development of that gift, and along the way explores in depth Graham's contemporaries, technique, and the dance world generally. This is meaty, detailed stuff, and all in de Mille's wonderful voice. On Doris Humphrey: ``...she analyzed everything. It was not enough that a fall or lean could be lovely. She had to explain why...Her own dancing seemed to have little personality, while Martha's was electrifying.'' On the relationship between a choreographer's physique and his work, and Graham's in particular: she claimed that she always choregraphed falls on the left because the heart is on the left. ``Maybe so,'' says de Mille, ``but to this dancer it seems that it really was because her left leg and thigh were stronger and more stretched out.'' De Mille drops a number of bombshells here, particularly in her discussions of Graham's emotional life. She had stormy, sometimes physically abusive (by both parties) relationships in her life. De Mille describes the two most intense crises: Graham's failed marriage to Erick Hawkins; and her forced retirement as a dancer, in 1968, at age 72. This latter precipitated a physical collapse that de Mille names convincingly as being alcoholic. ``Martha got well, in her own way, in her own time, and without alcohol. Martha rose from the dead, and verily, she was changed now.'' A loving, respectful, but always cleareyed account of the human Graham. A must for fans of Graham's, de Mille's, dance- -indeed, anyone wanting a clear picture of a creative era that is fast drawing to a close. (Thirty-two pp. of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-55643-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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