RaveThe New RepublicRobb...shows how intensely a ballerina’s training revolves around antiquated ideals of femininity—a femininity for which she is expected to suffer in silence. She draws from a breathtaking range of sources to build her case ... As much as Robb’s book is a reflection on the way young dancers can be abused within the hierarchies of ballet institutions, it’s also an attempt to recover the promise of dance ... Vivid.
Edouard Louis, Trans. by Lorin Stein
PositiveThe Baffler\"In Who Killed My Father, Louis seems to have learned, launching a counter-attack in the attempt to make the book bourgeois-proof ... The homecoming recounted in this book, linking the intimate with the political, does not blunt Louis’s message, but sharpens it to a fine point ... This is not politics as love, but love as politics. A declaration to his father becomes a manifesto.\
Simon Morrison
PositiveThe New RepublicAll of this makes for good, even great, fodder. Bolshoi Confidential is a 512-page-long history that includes sex scandals, double-suicide pacts, bribery, arson, executions, prostitution rings, embezzlement, starving orphans, dead cats in lieu of flowers, and ballerinas refusing to shave their armpits ... [Morrison] illustrates the madness well, often doing so with an understated sense of fate’s ironies. The story loses its thread, however, in a forest of facts, the accumulation of which, no matter how interesting, don’t always make history. Sometimes the details lift off the page, arresting the narrative flow in order to reveal the symbolic aura of an act or milieu; often they don’t.
