The tastefully yet candidly told life story of one of America's most gifted dancers, a former wife of George Balanchine. Tallchief was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief in 1925, to an alcoholic but loving Osage Indian father and a white mother in small-town Oklahoma. When the family moved to Los Angeles, she began studying ballet with Bronislava Nijinska (``It was from Madame Nijinska that I first understood that the dancer's soul is in the middle of the body''). Tallchief joined the Ballet Russe while still a teenager and changed her name to Maria at the suggestion of Agnes de Mille. She first worked with Balanchine in 1944, when he was hired as a choreographer by the Ballet Russe. A year later, the much older man of few words shocked her by saying casually that ``I would like you to become my wife.'' Although this collaboration between Tallchief and ghostwriter Kaplan (Prodigal Son, 1992) does not include much about Tallchief's firsthand view of Balanchine's revisionary classical technique, the book abounds with droll tales and with detailed descriptions of her roles in Balanchine's The Firebird, The Nutcracker, Orpheus, and Sylvia, among others. She chronicles, too sketchily, doings among her famous fellow dancers at the New York City Ballet. Her marriage to Balanchine ended in an annulment. Tallchief is equally frank and lively in describing her career after Balanchines, including an affair with the nubile Rudolf Nureyev. (``I taught him the twist . . . he picked it up right away.'') She also offers penetrating, if tactful, criticism of NYCB's post-Balanchine regime: ``The irony of George's remark that `ballet is woman' is that today most of the companies in the world are being run by men . . . the contribution former Balanchine ballerinas can make, ballerinas who worked directly with George and who created their roles, isn't being valued, not even in George's own company.'' What would happen, one wonders, if this remarkable woman were running things? (32 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-3302-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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