About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Larry Tye
Positive The Wall Street Journal While one might wish for more musical detail about this transformation, it’s in describing people that Mr. Tye’s strengths shine ... Mr. Tye has an easy way of telling a story, a knack for characterization and a pacing that feels right.
Karen Valby
Positive The Wall Street Journal Thanks in part to her book, that history can be told with greater fidelity—a history to inspire dancers and dance enthusiasts alike.
Joseph Horowitz
Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Horowitz writes powerfully and with enviable authority. In examining Thomson’s views, he discusses Van Wyck Brooks’s ideas about a \'usable past.\' He connects Ives’s use of vernacular musical sources in the composer’s third symphony with Mark Twain’s use of vernacular speech in Huckleberry Finn. He bolsters his treatment of musical nostalgia by considering nostalgic elements in the paintings of John Singer Sargent. Possibly Mr. Horowitz overrates Ives and underrates Copland, but his positions are always clearly staked out and amply supported ... Horowitz helps us appreciate what treasures we do have.
Jerome Robbins, Ed. by Amanda Vaill
Rave The Wall Street Journal To help us better understand Robbins, Amanda Vaill has compiled a rich selection of his writings ... Drawing on the Robbins archive in the New York Public Library and on the correspondence of his friends and associates, Ms. Vaill has produced a hit of her own out of Robbins’s letters, diaries, sketches and notes. For each chronological section she has also provided a substantial preface; taken together, they amount to a distillation of her definitive 2006 biography, Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins ... Ms. Vaill’s book is filled with vivid details about the dailiness of Robbins’ life.
Nadine Meisner
Rave The Wall Street Journal The first life of Petipa in English, Nadine Meisner’s Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master is engaging, well-researched and strong on context ... Ms. Meisner’s biography is impressively detailed. She has pored over the memoirs of Petipa’s dancers and assistants, as well as his own...She has also consulted newspaper interviews and reviews...She has studied the copious records of the Imperial Theaters and drawn profitably on the writings of dance scholars and cultural historians. Pulling together the many threads of her research, Ms. Meisner weaves a rich portrait of Petipa, his circumstances, his times.
E. Douglas Bomberger
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Bomberger captures well the reigning emphasis in 1917 on Americanness ... Making Music American has a satisfying structure and natural propulsion.