A moving if scattershot account of every dancer’s worst nightmare and the sacrifices required to overcome it.
A brilliant dancer chronicles his success at two of the world’s major ballet companies and the injury that almost cost him his career.
From an early age, Hallberg knew he wanted to be a dancer. While in elementary school, he saw his first Fred Astaire movie, and from that moment, “dance has stayed with me every day of my life.” He taped nickels to the soles of penny loafers and tap-danced in them, even in grocery stores, until his supportive parents bought him proper tap shoes. At 11, he attended his first ballet class and learned that ballet was his true passion. He also discovered that he was gay. Classmates picked on him, including the time four bullies formed a circle around him and doused him with perfume. But life improved: New York’s American Ballet Theatre accepted him into their Studio Company, a training ground for young dancers. He became one of ABT’s principal dancers and stayed until, after five years, he “began craving something new and uncharted” and joined the Bolshoi. Hallberg writes candidly about his career and the injury that almost ended it: a damaged ligament in his foot, an injury so severe he needed two surgeries, two years of rehabilitation, and several months in Melbourne to work with an Australian Ballet physiotherapist who had saved many dancers’ careers. Unfortunately, the author’s descriptions of the many ballets he has performed are repetitive. The book would have been stronger if he had focused only on those that marked dramatic career points rather than compose what feels like a laundry list of every ballet he’s ever danced and every ballerina he has ever partnered. Yet this is still an inspiring story of Hallberg’s rise to the pinnacle of his profession and his battle to reclaim his career.
A moving if scattershot account of every dancer’s worst nightmare and the sacrifices required to overcome it.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7115-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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