A lively biography of the choreographer who helped recreate the Broadway musical, infused ballet with American verve and humor, and became a leading spokesperson for dance and the arts in general. De Mille, who died in 1993 at the age of 88, told her own life story with grace and spirit in such volumes as Dance to the Piper and And Promenade Home. But Easton adds considerably to our understanding of this woman who, despite an undancerly physique, was determined to express herself in movement. Following de Mille's life from her childhood in Hollywood as the daughter of writer/director William de Mille and niece of Cecil B. De Mille, through her early career struggles, her eventual huge successes with Oklahoma! and Rodeo, and subsequent ups and downs of her career, Easton underscores (sometimes too much) one central theme. De Mille's desperate and ungratified need for approval from her father became the driving, and usually destructive, force in her relationships with men. She did marry finally at age 36, a man who repeated the early indignity she felt: Despite his love for her, Walter Prude never thought highly of his wife's choreography. Easton also convincingly details how this need for a man's approval and a sense of sexual inferiority coexisted with a fierce independence and self-assurance. And all of these traits informed her most enduring creations, from the the desperate Lizzie Borden in Fall River Legend to Laurey's dream in Oklahoma!. Either Easton is a master interviewer, or else those who loved and hated de Mille (and the choreographer herself, whom Easton interviewed before her death) were eager for a chance to go on the record: Their rich quotes enhance this biography. James Mitchell, one of her closest associates, said, ``Agnes enslaved people. She knew her power and that people would do for her.'' It may not be the case that ``no other dancer has approached the breadth of her achievement,'' as Easton says, but this is a generally objective and useful summary of de Mille's life and works.
Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-19970-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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