A choreographer’s wild stories and engaging insights into love, life and artistic practice.
A candid memoir of misadventures and modern dance.
In this talky debut, dancer and choreographer Petronio looks at the formative experiences that set his dance career in motion—and the momentum that’s carried him forward ever since. His wit and penchant for getting into ridiculous situations may call to mind celebrated gay memoirists such as David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, but Petronio, a self-described “awkward boy/obstinate man,” has a story that’s all his own. He grew up in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s and, after a college girlfriend encouraged him to take his first dance class, went on to have an acclaimed career. His trajectory is quite impressive, and readers interested in the downtown New York art and performance scene will enjoy his stories about collaborating with people such as Lou Reed, Cindy Sherman, Rufus Wainwright and Yoko Ono, to name a few. On the other hand, the name-dropping sometimes clutters the narrative with superfluous detail and contributes to an undercurrent of self-satisfaction. The book’s range of tones, however, proves to be one of its greatest strengths; the author is equally at ease with introspection as he is with showmanship, proving that camp and spiritual inquiry aren’t mutually exclusive. Unsurprisingly, he has a gift for articulating the complex experiences of movement and performance, and some of his best prose comes when he’s describing dance. Under the header “Two versions of the same dance on different nights,” for example, he offers two conflicting accounts: One begins, “My arm is moving like no other in history,” and the other starts, “I am moving my arm, how humiliating.” Overall, Petronio approaches his most sacred material—his life’s work—with humor and grace.
A choreographer’s wild stories and engaging insights into love, life and artistic practice.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492736547
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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