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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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