An uneven, sometimes bitter, yet always revealing portrait of one of America's most innovative artists.
A celebrated American choreographer looks back on his life.
“I can be demanding, even mean,” admits Morris, a boss so tough that members of his company once staged “a power coup, an organized boycott” to voice their grievances. Yet he is supportive of talent he admires. Readers see both sides of him in this memoir, co-written by musician and novelist Stace (Wonderkid, 2015, etc.). Morris begins with his Seattle childhood, when he would wedge his feet into Tupperware juice glasses to imitate older sister Marianne, who took ballet, “by walking on pointe in the front room.” From there, the author describes his early years in New York, his male lovers, his stint as Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, and his creation of some of the finest modern dances of the past 40 years, including Dido and Aeneas. Morris devotes much of the book to taking pot shots at people who have wronged him. He names a ballet teacher from his first days in New York and writes, “I couldn’t stand her,” but he doesn't say why. As a young dancer, he studied with a dance company “run by a creep called Charles Bennett.” Derek Walcott, who wrote the libretto for the Paul Simon musical The Capeman, which Morris choreographed, was “ham-fisted, bigoted, lecherous”; he “started as an asshole, ended as a monster, and finally disowned the whole thing.” Some of this opprobrium may be deserved, but the cumulative effect feels petty. Morris is equally generous with praise, however, as when he refers to the “founding women—the goddesses, the pillars” of the Mark Morris Dance Group. He also describes the geneses of his major dances and offers laudatory anecdotes about such collaborators as Yo-Yo Ma, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lou Harrison, and others. Morris once described his philosophy of dance as, “I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy.” That philosophy yielded marvelous results. If only the book contained more dance and less score-settling.
An uneven, sometimes bitter, yet always revealing portrait of one of America's most innovative artists.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2307-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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