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I REMEMBER BALANCHINE

Name: I REMEMBER BALANCHINE
Author: Francis Mason
ISBN: 0-385-26610-3

: RECOLLECTIONS OF THE BALLET MASTER BY THOSE WHO KNEW HIM

by Francis Mason ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1991

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``I don't think there is a definitive portrait of Balanchine,'' says longtime New York City Ballet administrator Betty Cage herein. ``Everybody has a different view, a different perspective...all true in certain ways and all lacking in certain ways.'' This collection of more than 75 such perspectives from friends and associates ultimately tells us much more about the contributors than about Balanchine-but is nonetheless entertaining and often riveting. Mason (editor of Ballet Review) does put his finger on why talking about Balanchine reveals so much about the speakers: ``I have never known so many people so eager to talk about a man. Balanchine was clearly a dominant figure to all of them: talking about him explained themselves, relived their careers, made sense of their lives, assimilated the past for the future.'' Throughout, this leads to a seriousness and solemnity in interviews from such widely varied personalities as Alexandra Danilova, Nureyev, Erick Hawkins, Katherine Dunham, and Darci Kistler. Lincoln Kirstein, quoted in a 1933 letter to a friend after first meeting Balanchine, is full of the urgency of having recognized a genius: ``This will be the most important letter I will ever write you...My pen burns my hand...We have a real chance to have an American ballet within 3 years time...'' Mason deftly lets each distinctive voice come through loud and clear. Here is Edward Villella on discussing the essence of gesture with Balanchine: ``At the beginning of the pas de deux, Apollo and Tersichore touch their fingertips together, and I said, `Jeez, that's really very beautiful.' '' And there are plenty of sidelights into dance history that have nothing to do with Balanchine. The ballerina Tamara Geva (Balanchine's first wife) remembers Isadora Duncan: ``I shall never forget her performance: Wagnerian music, with a symphony orchestra down below in the pit, and up on the stage of the Maryinsky this lady stretched out on the floor. She lay there for a long time while we were all waiting for something to happen.'' A massive (640-page), eloquent effort that provides a valuable oral history of the ballet world. If it doesn't add to our knowledge of Balanchine, it does, most importantly, underscore his extraordinary contribution. As Helgi Tomasson, now director of the San Francisco Ballet poignantly captures the elusiveness of dance as well as of Balanchine's genius: ``the farther we get from his leaving us, the less we will remember.''

Pub Date: May 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-385-26610-3

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

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This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945

ISBN: 0061130249

Page Count: 450

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
by Richard Wright

- BOOK REVIEW
SEEING INTO TOMORROW
by Richard Wright ; illustrated by Nina Crews

- BOOK REVIEW
A FATHER’S LAW
by Richard Wright

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.