An often engaging remembrance of past pains and present realizations.
A dancer and choreographer navigates her body’s physical limits, her emotional turmoil, and her quest to keep a dream alive in this debut memoir.
Tatelbaum writes that she started ballet lessons in 1986, when she was 8 years old. She was never able to accomplish smooth landings after her pliés, however, because of her short Achilles tendons. This brought her additional heartbreak when her teacher, referred to only as Miss Lorraine, noted that she didn’t have the body to be a dancer. Still, the author remained determined to become the best performer she could be. Luckily for her, Lorraine hired Clea, a modern-dance teacher who exposed the 11-year-old girl to a new world of motion. When Tatelbaum turned 14, she expanded her knowledge further by taking classes at the Alvin Ailey school. Eventually, she graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, started a dance company, and became a successful choreographer. Things went well for her until she stopped getting callbacks, and she realized that she was stuck in a rut; she also felt unfulfilled in her career as a Pilates instructor. The memoir is split into three parts: The first describes the state that she found herself in when she was ready to give up, the second focuses on her background, and the third describes her later healing. Throughout, readers will easily sympathize with the exhaustion and constant pains that the author felt in her bones (“Ever since senior year at Tisch, my left hip had been snapping when I kicked my leg above ninety degrees”) and how she was still willing to go through it all to pursue her aspirations. The reader also gets a vivid glimpse into her emotional exhaustion when she describes her clients as ATMs, explicitly details her anger and resentment, and shows her despair when she asks her therapist, “How do I get out of here? Help me.” Tatelbaum never shies away from painful moments on her journey, and this adds a depth to her narrative that will keep readers invested.
An often engaging remembrance of past pains and present realizations.Pub Date: April 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-945060-46-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Motina Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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