Duncan’s star has faded somewhat, and Kurth’s life should restore some of its shine. Fans of modern dance and 20th-century...
A well-detailed if unevenly paced life of the renowned American dancer, who craved and courted fame and earned it even in the manner of her death.
Magazine journalist Kurth has carved a niche as a biographer of trailblazing women; his Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra (1995) focused closely on the German-born Russian empress, while American Cassandra (1990) portrayed the difficult life of journalist Dorothy Thompson. Here, he takes on the legendary, self-possessed dancer Isadora Duncan, the scion of California pioneers who introduced a kind of raw-boned American primitivism (which she claimed were channeled into her by the Greek gods themselves) into forms borrowed from ballet, inventing modern dance in the process. Duncan’s eventful, borderline life, a swirl of love affairs, international tours, and alcoholism, often outpaces Kurth’s narrative, which sometimes struggles to keep up with a wealth of sometimes contradictory details. (Was she a Bolshevik? A proto-fascist? A libertarian? To judge by Duncan’s own words, her politics depended on her mood du jour.) Still, Kurth gamely follows the dancer from one blaze of glory to the next as she captivates audiences on stages throughout Europe, tends to orphans of the Russian Civil War, preaches and practices the doctrine of free love (“there is nothing so terrible or immoral as a virtuous woman,” she once declared), and descends into an alcoholic fog that ends in an unfortunate, but trademark, demise. A demerit: Kurth tends to be uncritical or apologetic when confronted with evidence of Duncan’s megalomania and, more unpleasantly, racist views. On the plus side, though, he capably captures Duncan’s bohemian, sometimes revolutionary milieu, populated by the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Andrei Bely, Francis Picabia, Edward Steichen, and Sergei Yesenin—the last the great but hopelessly drunk poet whom she married, to her regret.
Duncan’s star has faded somewhat, and Kurth’s life should restore some of its shine. Fans of modern dance and 20th-century cultural history will find this rewarding.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-50726-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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