A fresh, authentic account of art, adversity and family.
The bittersweet story of a Cuban ballet dancer’s rise to international fame.
Born in 1973 in a suburb of Havana, Acosta aspired to become a soccer star. His dream ended at age nine when his father Pedro, a stern disciplinarian, forced him to enroll in ballet school. An Afro-Cuban truck driver whose relationship with Acosta’s fair-skinned mother had scandalized her family, as a youth Pedro had been ejected from a whites-only cinema while watching a silent film about ballet. In a debut memoir noteworthy for its candor, energy and colorful sketches of life in Cuba, Acosta depicts the grueling world of ballet against the backdrop of the challenges he confronted in a country undergoing major upheaval during the 1990s. Triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and resultant loss of economic aid, the era known in Cuba as the “Special Period” gave rise to massive food and gasoline shortages, daily power outages and a national despair that prompted thousands to flee the country on rough-hewn rafts. The winner at age 16 of a prestigious international ballet competition in Switzerland, Acosta was permitted by the Cuban government to perform as a guest artist with numerous dance companies, including the Houston Ballet. He writes poignantly that his elation about his career was deflated each time he boarded a plane and left his struggling family. Acosta’s chronicle of his efforts to integrate his success as a black ballet dancer with his complex feelings about his country and ambivalence about a profession he didn’t choose makes a lively, provocative read. Now based in London, he has been celebrated in recent years as the choreographer and lead dancer of Tocororo, a ballet inspired by the pain and passion of his upbringing in Cuba.
A fresh, authentic account of art, adversity and family.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6629-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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