More a celebration of celebrity than a tribute to a great dancer. Stuart, a contributor to the scholarly Ballet Review as well as to Vanity Fair and other publications, is capable of more intelligent writing than he offers in this jumbled biography of Nureyev. When not reminding us what an ``epic'' life Nureyev had, he's emphasizing that everything relating to the dancer was the biggest, the greatest, the most. Nureyev's was indeed a remarkable story, the creation of an indomitable will: Raised in harsh poverty in a remote town in the Urals, a teen-age Nureyev, determined to dance, got himself to Leningrad and into the prestigious Kirov ballet school. Stuart asserts, without naming any sources, that Nureyev's personal and professional unconventionality (and homosexuality) brought him to the attention of the KGB, which set up a sexual trap for him in Paris during the Kirov's 1961 tour. Fearing exile, Nureyev defected to the West. His subsequent career- -his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn, his peripatetic dancing life with everyone from the National Ballet of Canada to Martha Graham, his embattled directorship of the Paris OpÇra Ballet—is covered in a sometimes perfunctory fashion, though often brightened by comments from friends (``Rudi was as cute as a baby cheetah,'' says ballerina Nadia Nerina). But emphasizing the titillating, Stuart opens with Nureyev's moribund appearance at a 1992 Paris OpÇra premiere (he would soon die of AIDS) and devotes an entire chapter to Nureyev's apparently insatiable sexuality (we learn not only with whom, but how often and in what position). He regales us with episodes of Nureyev's well-known ire. Nevertheless, a skeletal portrait does emerge: of a man with a voracious hunger for dance and for life; a man who never recovered from the insecurity of his childhood, even after amassing a fortune; a courageous artist who never let AIDS ravage his spirit as it did his body. Stuart says that Nureyev's huge fame was the product of an age of mass publicity; so is this hastily assembled (by the author's own admission) biography.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-87539-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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