Full of intimate tidbits from the inner sanctum of professional ballet, d’Amboise’s journal of his illustrious career is a...
The hefty autobiography of a celebrated New York City Ballet principal dancer whose career prospered for more than four decades.
Other luminaries of ballet have treated this often-mysterious world with down-to-earth candor—including Suzanne Farrell in Holding On to the Air (1990) and NYCB co-founder Lincoln Kirstein in Mosaic (1994)—but here, in his first book, d’Amboise moves beyond the breadth of his own experiences, mapping out the complex evolution of ballet in America. The author threads lively personal reminiscences and anecdotes with intriguing portraits of choreographers and fellow dancers, along with passages detailing the socio-political backdrops to his childhood and career. He infuses his accounts of rigorous rehearsals, exhaustive touring schedules and the harsher side of theater life with warmth, realism and charm, and allows melodramatic dialogue and pithy repartée to buoy overly long swaths of ballet terms and methodology. In one memorable passage, Kirstein is seen panicking about the survival of the company after his business partner, classical ballet titan George Balanchine, passed away, and his fiery tirade is dark and brutally honest: “At last, the tyranny of one man is over! Balanchine was never my friend. Do you think he ever asked me out socially? It was always business.” Poignant moments also emerge, as when a well-loved former ballerina, close to death, reflected dryly to d’Amboise, “You know all this bullshit about the afterlife? Well, there is one. It’s what’s left behind, from the way you lived. We did a pretty good job.” Now in his mid-70s, the author, too, is wistful yet satisfied, with countless feathers in his theatrical hat.
Full of intimate tidbits from the inner sanctum of professional ballet, d’Amboise’s journal of his illustrious career is a trove of stage icons, grand performances and hard-won personal triumphs.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4234-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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