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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
