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 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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