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It was their sole encounter, but the sheer force and élan of Balanchine's personality, technique and genius held the young ballerina in total thrall from that day to this. As Moira Shearer observed his works over the years, she determined to set down Balanchine's extraordinary career and tempestuous life from a dancer's perspective. She researched his Russian youth, and the dazzling Diaghilev and continental years. She talked with key colleagues, ex-wives and impresarios as living background to her account of his hard-won triumphs with the New York City Ballet as the most innovative and important choreographer of this century. The story of Balanchine's life is here is full, the romantic destructiveness and willfulness along with the genius, but it is informal and distillate rather than compendious.
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The private and performance lives of five female dancers in Western dance history
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From mid-twentieth-century films such as Grand Hotel, Waterloo Bridge, and The Red Shoes to recent box-office hits including Billy Elliot, Save the Last Dance, and The Company, ballet has found its way, time and again, onto the silver screen and into the hearts of many otherwise unlikely audiences. In Dying Swans and Madmen, Adrienne L. McLean explores the curious pairing of classical and contemporary, art and entertainment, high culture and popular culture to reveal the ambivalent place that this art form occupies in American life. Drawing on examples that range from musicals to tragic melodramas, she shows how commercial films have produced an image of ballet and its artists that is associated both with joy, fulfillment, fame, and power and with sexual and mental perversity, melancholy, and death. Although ballet is still received by many with a lack of interest or outright suspicion, McLean argues that these attitudes as well as ballet's popularity and its acceptability as a way of life and a profession have often depended on what audiences first learned about it from the movies.
For most Americans, the words “Lockerbie, Scotland” evoke one image: the iconic photograph of the battered nose cone of a Pan Am jumbo jet surrounded by bodies, investigators, and debris on a lonely hillside. For members of the Syracuse University community, the words represent the loss of 35 students, who died returning from a semester abroad when their jet exploded over Lockerbie. The terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988, killed all 259 people aboard, plus 11 Lockerbie residents, in a tragedy that remained the deadliest terror attack on U.S. citizens until 9/11. The event forever linked the U.S. with Lockerbie, whose residents provided unsparing help and sympathy...
"Do you know why I write so much? Because as long as you read, we are together." -- Raizel Garncarz (Sala's sister), April 24, 1941 Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. But then, few families have a mother and a daughter quite like Sala and Ann Kirschner. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly presen...
The ballet dancer explores her life and career, with emphasis on her beginnings during World War II.
Reviled on its release, Peeping Tom (1960) all-but ended the career of director Michael Powell, previously one of Britain's most revered filmmakers. The story of a murderous cameraman and his compulsion to record his killings, Powell's film stunned the same critics who had acclaimed him for the work he'd made with writer-producer Emeric Pressburger (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943; A Matter of Life and Death, 1946), resulting in the film falling out of circulation almost as soon as it was released. It took the 1970s 'Movie Brat' generation to rehabilitate the director, and the film, which is now regarded as a masterpiece. In this Devil's Advocate, published to coincide with the film's 60th anniversary, Kiri Walden charts the origins, production and devastating critical reception of Peeping Tom, comparing it to the treatment meted out to its contemporary horror classic, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).