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 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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