A candid, instructive reflection on artistry, dedication, and race.
A pioneering Black dancer recounts her hard-won success.
In 2015, Copeland (b. 1982) became the first Black ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre promoted to principal dancer, 14 years after joining the company. Following up on her previous memoir, Life in Motion, Copeland, assisted by Fales-Hill, describes the challenges, frustrations, and successes of her career, paying special homage to her friend and mentor, Raven Wilkinson (1935-2018), who danced with the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo in the 1950s, the first Black woman to get a contract with a major ballet company. With unfailing encouragement and pragmatic advice, Wilkinson helped the younger dancer navigate a profession often unwelcoming to Blacks. “She showed me,” Copeland writes, “that we dance for all those who came before us and the many who will hopefully come after us.” When she seemed overwhelmed by self-doubt, Wilkinson reminded her, “Every time you step on that stage, I’ll be the wind at your back.” She buoyed Copeland’s spirits as she recovered from a severe injury and when she felt isolated and alone: For her first 10 years at ABT, she was the only Black woman dancer; later, she was one of only three dancers of color among a company of 80. A soloist for many years, she despaired about being given principal roles: “Would any Black ballerina ever shatter ABT’s glass ceiling?” she asked herself. Wilkinson urged her to speak openly with the company’s artistic director, and finally, at age 32, she debuted in principal roles, including Odile/Odette in Swan Lake. Although Copeland never faced the racial violence that Wilkinson encountered when she toured the South in the 1950s, she admits that racism hindered her opportunities and stoked her anxiety about “the reaction of critics and the jabs from online commentators that maybe I wasn’t ‘right’ for these leading roles”—fears amply assuaged by her audiences’ acclaim.
A candid, instructive reflection on artistry, dedication, and race.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5385-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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