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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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