Browsable inspiration for dancers of any age or physical ability.
Ballet master Jhung (The Finis Jhung Ballet Technique, 2014) leaps into the spotlight with a memoir about his life and enduring career.
The Honolulu-born author says he knew that he was going to be a dancer in 1946, when he was only 9 years old. His father was Korean-American, and his mother had Scottish, English, and Korean roots; after World War II, they divorced, and Jhung’s mother struggled financially to raise him and his two brothers. Even so, the author was later able to attend the University of Utah, where he learned ballet from William F. Christensen, a founder of the San Francisco Ballet. A college friend connected Jhung with composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, and in 1960, he danced in their Broadway musical Flower Drum Song. His career took him to the San Francisco Ballet and both the Robert Joffrey Ballet and the Harkness Ballet in New York City. However, he gave it all up in 1969 to devote his life to Buddhism. By 1972, though, he’d returned to his passion and become a dance teacher. Jhung now teaches all ages and skill levels. This is an expansive memoir with many striking black-and-white photos. Jhung’s prose feels familial, as if one is sitting with him as he points to photos and remembers stories. For example, next to an image of himself dancing as a child, he writes, “If you look through the doorway behind me, you can see a wrapped gift on the bed. Could we be celebrating my mom’s wedding?” It’s a down-to-earth voice—at one point, he describes ballet as “a ‘bitchy’ art”—and some of his stories have compellingly eccentric characters, such as a Danish dancer named Lone Isaksen. Other memories, such as the death of his first child, are sharply poignant. The final chapters include a daily log of Jhung’s recovery from hip surgery and gushing student recommendations that read like ads for his classes. However, other student anecdotes are more memorable; one 67-year-old woman, told by her physical therapist that she needed to use a walker, took dance lessons instead.
Browsable inspiration for dancers of any age or physical ability.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9913898-0-3
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Ballet Dynamics, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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