The definitive account of a remarkable and flawed artist.
An intricate, meticulously researched biography of the revered and controversial dance icon.
George Balanchine (1904-1983), famed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was private about his genius and how he created such beautiful art. He once turned down a request for his biography, saying that his inspiration “is not going to be written down anywhere, for anybody to know.” In this engrossing, vivid account of his life, Homans, a former dancer and current critic for the New Yorker, acknowledges her subject’s personal failings while also portraying him as a man enjoying the sensuous pleasures of life. After the powerlessness and instability of his childhood in Russia, he fashioned an identity for himself in a world that he could control using a language that he helped create. He spoke through his dancers. The author, who also wrote Apollo’s Angels: The History of Ballet, is an expert in her field, and she eschews the task of trying to “define” Balanchine, instead unearthing the various “truths” about him and presenting them without judgment. Homans creates an admiring, honest, and page-turning tribute to this magnetic and complicated figure. Though the text is grounded in conscientious research, the author acknowledges the inability to ever truly “know” a person. The candid admission of Balanchine's fluidity of memory enables Homans to compose a biography that has all of the sumptuousness and lyricism of a fairy tale. She movingly depicts numerous key moments in her subject’s life, from his mother miraculously winning the lottery and subsequently losing the fortune to Balanchine being plucked from the examination pool to join the ballet corps of the Imperial Theater School. Given that Balanchine embellished some memories and omitted others from his own narrative, this gripping book reveals a talented artist who feels familiar and yet unknowable and whose greatest creation was quite possibly his own mystique, which still fascinates.
The definitive account of a remarkable and flawed artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9430-8
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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