Interesting but self-congratulatory reading.
A celebrated African-American ballet dancer’s account of her unlikely rise to stardom.
Home was a relative term for Copeland. Her mother left her father when she was 2 and took the family from Kansas City to Southern California. There, they moved in with a man who was an alcoholic. Several years later, the author’s mother took her children and moved in with another man who ruled the family home with a stern, and sometimes brutal, hand. In this new environment, Copeland, who loved to perform, discovered that she could also “instantly do moves that it might take others months to achieve.” She began to teach herself gymnastics and, in middle school, became the drill team captain. Encouraged to take ballet classes at the local chapter of the Boys and Girls Club, Copeland learned basic ballet movement with astonishing rapidity. “I began hearing a word over and over again…that would follow me, define me,” she writes. “Prodigy.” But as her dancing flourished, her home life began to crumble. Soon, she, her mother and siblings had moved into a crowded motel room. A ballet teacher brought Copeland to live with her and prepare “for the career that was looming for [her].” Under pressure from her increasingly outraged mother, the courts forced the woman to return the girl to her home. By then, Copeland’s talent had brought her media attention and offers to attend schools sponsored by prestigious dance companies. One, the American Ballet Theatre, eventually became her permanent home. As Copeland learned, however, her dream to dance ballet and become a soloist for the ABT came at a high price, both physically and emotionally. Copeland’s depiction of the drive that pushed her to succeed in a white-dominated art form is inspiring, but she often overplays her narrative hand to the point where self-assurance comes across as smugness or arrogance.
Interesting but self-congratulatory reading.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3798-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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