Villella was a star among stars, the athletic all-American boy of the New York City Ballet from the late 1950's through the 70's. His career spanned ``a golden age of ballet, an amazing era in which George Balanchine single-handedly transformed the art. I watched him do it. I was part of it all.'' Villella's account of those years is as straightforward and forthright as this dancer himself. Villella followed his sister into ballet classes at age nine- -risky business for a boy in Bayside, Queens. A year later, he was accepted into the School of American Ballet, NYCB's training ground. Villella went on to spend his entire performing career with NYCB and Balanchine. At his parents' insistence, he left dance for four years to complete a bachelor's degree—a hiatus that had physical ramifications for the rest of his career. However, those years ``gave me another perspective on dancing and kept me from becoming too ascetic and pretentious.'' And certainly Villella held himself apart from most of the company; without rancor, he additionally attributes this to his short stature (5`8'') and consequent need to fight for new roles, his heterosexuality, and his eternally difficult relationship with Balanchine. The two never had an open, relaxed relationship: ``I was unusually tongue-tied around him....He made me uncomfortable because he was so sure of himself and his art.'' Villella's decision not to take Balanchine's famous—and peculiar—classes because he found them physically destructive further distanced him: ``Until his dying day I don't think he forgave me for not praying at his altar.'' There are plenty of sidelights here as well: tales of tours, other dancers, company intrigues. And Villella gives a complete account of his devastating, career-ending injuries, as well as of how he found his way to be the phenomenally successful artistic director of the Miami City Ballet. Throughout, Villella appears as his immensely talented, intelligent, self-absorbed, and opinionated self: a cleareyed account of a most remarkable career in a remarkable time. (Thirty- two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-72370-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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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