Journalist Solway (A Dance Against Time, 1994) performs a commendable research mission on behalf of the glamorous, troublesome late ballet star Rudolf Nureyev (1938—93). Though as narrator she’s almost too tenaciously conscientious to do justice to his bottomless flamboyance, the dancer’s less savory side (gay hustlers at midnight; jeweled jockstraps) perhaps speaks for itself. In some ways, the most interesting part of the book concerns Nureyev’s life as a child. Born aboard a Trans-Siberian Express train, he grew up a Tatar, descended from Genghis Khan, in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, with interruptions and stays in Moscow. War and penury beset his Muslim family: “Potatoes were the only staple.” The deprivations of his early life, and Nureyev’s difficult relationship with his taciturn and tyrannical father, may have bred his successive rebellions. Ballet was the most telling of these. Though he started training late and in some respects never could compensate in his technique for the lost time, Nureyev’s determination and remarkably feral allure onstage carried him through adversity at the Leningrad Ballet School and the Kirov Ballet to his celebrated 1961 defection to the West and subsequent decades of theatrical antiheroism. Not for nothing was The Catcher in the Rye one of his favorite books; “Rudimania” saluted a Holdenesque iconoclast in tights. Solway is dogged and diplomatic in pursuit of him. Though her appraisals of his dancing lack the flourish and authority of an insider critic, she passes equably through the turbulent stages of Nureyev’s career, offering apt secondary portraits of Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and others. She is careful never to emphasize the tawdry or pathetic in Nureyev; he emerges as a desperate character who mistrusted banks and every other standard authority, who worked himself into unique extremes of exhaustion, and who failed to win the only real love of his life (Bruhn). So despite a few bandied clichÇs, Solway holds the stage. The sound and the fury, distilled. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-12873-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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