A sensitive biography of a young dancer/choreographer who died of AIDS just two days after his first two dances premiered at the Joffrey Ballet in March 1991. Freelance journalist Solway uses Edward Stierle's short life to contrast the development of a prodigious talent with the tragic waste of early death. She looks at these intertwining themes from the personal perspective of Stierle, his family, and close friends as well as considering them as part of a larger picture: the effect of AIDS on the dance world and on the arts scene in general. Born in 1968, Stierle was raised in Florida, the youngest of eight children of a hardworking high school custodian. His mother ferried her talented son from age four on to endless classes and auditions; she trumpeted his achievements to all who would listen and tried to control his personal life even after he moved to Europe and then New York City. In spite of a short, stocky build, Stierle became a brilliant dance technician and at age 16 won a gold medal in the prestigious Prix de Lausanne competition. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Joffrey Ballet, where he was put directly into starring roles and encouraged to choreograph. A tireless self-promoter, Stierle alienated many colleagues and friends by his obsession with his own talent and career—although after his death some would charitably attribute his urgency to the knowledge that he was running out of time. Stierle's struggle with his bisexuality is fully recounted here. He attributed his infection to a 1987 encounter in California, and although he was virtually symptom-free for a couple of years, by 1990 the disease was rapidly progressing as he worked desperately to finish the two extraordinary ballets- -Lacrymosa and Empyrean Dances—that are his legacy. While keeping Stierle's story within the context of the larger AIDS tragedy, Solway's plain, measured prose makes clear the personal and professional magnitude of this individual loss. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78894-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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