A somewhat meandering set of remembrances and meditations but one that may resonate with readers searching for an artistic...
A Russian-born dancer and teacher’s debut memoir expresses her love of the arts and tells of her search for new understanding.
Draw, an associate professor of dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, was born in Irkutsk, Siberia,and wanted to dance from a young age. At the age of 7, she began ballet training in a local studio and later progressed to the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet School. This led to a career in dance and dance instruction, in which her creative expression and artistic view of the world were valued. She recounts her experiences in Russia, Canada, Denmark, and, finally, the United States, exploring her relationship to her art and to the craft of teaching, and her insights will appeal not only to those who appreciate ballet, but also those with interest in the creative arts in general. At times, the memoir can slip a little too deeply into philosophical meditations, which can be jarring at times, but it naturally follows the author’s train of thought in a manner that’s refreshing. Particularly intriguing is the context that Draw provides regarding the operations of prestigious ballet schools. She also addresses authoritarianism in education and in government; she grew up in the Soviet Union and, for years, was unable to travel internationally under the Communist regime. Draw’s reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, demonstrate her later reawakening to the importance of the arts: “I was only occupied in Zoom calls with my class of 24 dancers from Monday to Friday, 10:00am to 1:00pm. This, to me, seemed like the only truly important thing I had to do.” These lead to an engaging section that explores a variety of topics, from dreams to creativity, that some readers may find inspiring.
A somewhat meandering set of remembrances and meditations but one that may resonate with readers searching for an artistic purpose.Pub Date: May 27, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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