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
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
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
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