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I Was A Dancer (2011)

by Jacques D'Amboise(Favorite Author)

3.89 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1400042348 (ISBN13: 9781400042340)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: This is a great book because you get to meet a man who understands luck (a theme in Richard Russo's Elsewhere as well) - that he was a 'wild, untamed boy' and dancing opened his life to enormous possibility. His mother, the Boss, is funny and also rather terrifying. And what a storyteller - something he undoubtedly learned from his mother - and what an open and compassionate heart - which I think he developed on his own. I love reading about dancing and love Balanchine's choreography, but what was most memorable about this book was its radiant happiness (what a contrast to Gelsey Kirkland's memoir).
review 2: At first brilliant, the book starts to drag and become uninteresting. Is it a personal memoir, a history of the NYCB, or a detailed survey of the NDI? D... more'Amboise tries to be everything here, and one interest level wavers depending on what one is actually interested in. Most crucially for the reader, the light deft prose which sparkles in the first section (dare I say, the prose dances on the page) becomes leaden and flat footed as the book progresses. This may indeed be designed to reflect the aging process on the technique of the dancer/writer; if so, it is an approach which alienates the reader/audience.Too bad, I loved this book at the beginning, but them it ambles and wanders and bores. less

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