MixedThe Wall Street JournalEnlightening, well-researched ... Fascinating details ... Brings to light an important, intriguing archive, but for all its strengths, the story is a little dry.
Deborah Jowitt
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal[Jowitt] is at her best in Errand Into the Maze when she allows herself to veer from her timeline and comment on the meaning of Graham.
Georgina Pazcoguin
RaveThe Washington Post... [a] witty, sobering, hell-raising memoir ... She exposes more turmoil at New York City Ballet than any fictional ballet melodrama could hope to match. Good luck trying to look away while she eviscerates the institution ... Pazcoguin attests to every suspicion you may harbor about ballet’s underbelly. The author has experienced them all ... There are enough real-life crises in this brisk, often laugh-out-loud tell-all to light the imagination of any cable TV script writer. But with her string of criticisms and even in her crazy-funny asides, Pazcoguin has a serious point to make about the ballet world ... Pazcoguin is not merely out for blood. It’s clear that she’s passionate about her art and devoted to the dancer’s life, no matter the late nights, early mornings and utter absence of things like dinner plans and weekends. Her outrage over the misbehavior is nuanced, not shrill, and she comes clean about what she sees as her own complicity and mistakes ... It\'s a corker.
Mark Morris and Wesley Stace
RaveThe Washington PostHe\'s...a gifted raconteur, as he makes clear in a rollicking, uninhibited and refreshingly raw memoir, aptly titled Out Loud. Whizzing through these adventures with him feels a lot like being in the audience at one of his lively post-performance question-and-answer sessions, where Morris the everlasting bon vivant delights in holding the spotlight, typically with a wine glass in hand. If, in this book, co-author Wesley Stace had to do much crafting or smoothing out, it’s brilliantly concealed ... Out Loud takes us on a swift-paced ride through a fascinating life whose joys and setbacks are viewed with a sharp eye and often dry humor. Nothing is belabored. In his writing as in his dances, Morris has a light hand. But his memoir is about more than the making of a choreographer. It’s about the layering on of self-worth, and how a solid sense of who you are can equip you to survive all kinds of hell ... Morris’s tolerance of just about everything except affectation and bad taste is uplifting; you can’t help but marvel at his cool invincibility (or call it professionalism or grace). It’s a treat to visit Morris’s hippie-ish 1960s childhood, where we meet his parents, two older sisters, a rowdy cast of relatives and other eccentrics ... Morris seems to spare no detail as he sifts through a habit of belittling eruptions in rehearsals ... it’s good that he writes freely and openly. A memoir needs unguarded outbursts as well as wisdom. It’s all splendidly resolved. As Morris takes us inside his creative process and his adventures—and shows us the courage of an artist who perseveres—there’s a great deal of light in these pages.
Siri Hustvedt
RaveThe Washington PostSiri Hustvedt, an authoritative and independent-minded writer on the arts and sciences, brings the felt experience into her smart, stimulating and hefty new collection of essays ... What’s exciting about Hustvedt’s work is her desire for us to see the world anew ... Hustvedt does not resolve her many questions, but her exhilarating conclusion testifies to the virtues of doubt ... the strength and lucidity of Hustvedt’s good thinking calls us to have confidence in our own instincts, to be alert to delusions and inherited traditions, and to realize that many truths are fiction, and only exist to the extent that we believe them.
