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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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