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
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 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
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