Acclaimed dancer Soto—a principal for the New York City Ballet for 20 years (1985–2005)—writes about his career, his Native American heritage, his homosexuality, his passion for cooking, his struggles to find a family and his discovery of love.
Now a teacher at the School of American Ballet, the author is not a talented writer—few pages pass before the clichés begin arriving (he was “determined to hit the ground running” and to avoid “falling between the cracks”)—but as his story, a true nowhere-to-somewhere tale, gathers momentum, it achieves a narrative power and an essential sweetness that is never cloying or annoying. The son of a Navajo mother and a Puerto Rican father, Soto recalls dancing native steps with his mother before he was 5. After seeing a ballet on the Ed Sullivan Show when was about 10, he fell permanently in love with the art. His parents—to their eternal credit—encouraged his passion (his macho father, though skeptical, drove him to countless lessons in the Southwest). It was soon evident to his teachers that his was no ordinary talent, and his career accelerated at warp speed. By his mid-teens, he was living on his own in New York City, working ferociously hard at the NYCB, developing relationships—colleagues, choreographers, lovers—and fashioning for himself an record. He has few unkind things to say about anyone and praises heavily his mentors (Balanchine, Robbins, Martins) and dancers (Heather Watts, Wendy Whelan). His kindest words are for his partner, Luis Fuentes. We learn, too, about his efforts to reunite his mother’s family, to exorcise a disturbing ghost and to find peace once his dance career ended. A powerful story, affectionately told, about the demands and dimensions of personal and professional success.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-173238-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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