A breezy and inviting biography from a self-described “zealot.”
A compact and incisive portrait of the great dancer and choreographer.
In 2015, after Lesser (You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, 2017, etc.) saw one of Robbins’ (1918-1998) final works, The Goldberg Variations, she sat “in a state of stunned amazement.” She welcomed the offer to write a biography for the publisher’s Jewish Lives series because she sees him as a “genius worth championing.” The author begins with Robbins as perhaps “the most hated man on Broadway.” Actors and dancers famously feared his “vicious outbursts” and “cruel perfectionism.” Others loved him deeply. He was always “high-strung and tormented,” according to one of his rehearsal pianists, and conflicted about his skills, homosexuality, and Jewish roots. Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz—he changed his name at the urging of a ballet teacher—to a “rarely affectionate” father and “forceful” mother, he possessed perfect pitch and an excellent sense of rhythm. He could “move naturally and expressively.” A stint at Camp Tamiment in the Catskills confirmed his first love, choreography. Throughout, Lesser focuses on Robbins as a “narrative artist,” perhaps one of the century’s “most powerful exemplars.” George Balanchine cast him in a musical in 1938, and Robbins soon began working with Leonard Bernstein. In 1951, he joined up with Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II on The King and I and developed a new style of dance, a “fusion between Eastern and Western modes.” A low point in his career came in 1953, when he named names for the House Un-American Activities Committee, something he later deeply regretted. The hits kept coming: Peter Pan, an “amazing achievement,” Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, and, with now close friend Bernstein, West Side Story, where he worked with a young Stephen Sondheim, who called Robbins the “only genius I’ve ever met.” As Lesser concludes, his “influence lives on even where his name may not.”
A breezy and inviting biography from a self-described “zealot.”Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-19759-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
