currently being updated: see all reviews at Nancy Dalva's book reviews in New York Observer
my book reviews in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
These include novels, memoirs, and biographies. Dance related reviews include biographies of Picasso, Rudolf Nureyev, Lincoln Kirstein, and a memoir by Carolyn Brown. The are listed by their order of publication, with the most recent at the top.
Tesla and the Pigeon: A Historical Romance
(1856-1943) is at the heart of Samantha
Hunt’s second novel.
THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE
By Samantha Hunt
Houghton Mifflin, 257 pages, $24
In her second novel—the first was the very well-received The Seas (2005)—Samantha Hunt has used her quite singular voice to animate a crowd of characters. The Seas was more or less a work of magic realism, a very grim fairy tale, with a feeling like (though none of the particulars of) the movie Edward Scissorhands. Creepy, disturbing, poetical. There was one main character, a young woman. read more »
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Bryson’s Guided Tour of Shakespeare’s World—Minus the Man Himself
like?
SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE
By Bill Bryson read more »
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All of Him: The Grim Behind the Gags (And a Clothing Allowance for Mom)
BORN STANDING UP: A COMIC'S LIFE
By Steve Martin
Scribner, 207 pages, $25
… Enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. —Steve Martin
Being funny isn’t fun. At the height of his great success as a stand-up comedian (crowds of 45,000), Steve Martin suffered from depression, exhaustion and the loneliness of the road. In 1981, at the top of the roller coaster, he walked away, into the movies. And into writing for them, and for The New Yorker, among other things. He’s very good at it; he’s a pleasure to read. But this memoir, one suspects, is something of a magic act. As if Steve Martin had reached into his magician’s top hat and instead of a rabbit, pulled out “Steve Martin.” read more »
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Lesson One of Picasso Bio: Don’t Be a Muse!
In this, the third installment of John Richardson’s epic biography of Picasso, we find that the artist, age 36, having been spurned by two mistresses to whom he’d proposed marriage, has fled wartime Paris for Rome and fallen in with the Ballets Russes. read more »
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Rapacious Rudy, Divine Dancer and Lifelong Émigre
I have a dance colleague who complains that there’s too much about sex in Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life, and another who says that there isn’t enough. read more »
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Louis Auchincloss at 90: Nasty Nookie in the Night
Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction. read more »
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A Head Case and a Ghost Converse
Rupert Thomson’s serenely eerie, trans-genre eighth novel is a head trip. It takes place in a straightforwardly narrative 12-hour span, yet zooms all over in time, as thought does, and space, as dreams do. read more »
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Kirstein’s Dance of Life: A Patron, But No Saint
In October 1960, Lincoln Kirstein “was able to confide to a few people that the state would be spending $17,500,000 to erect a dance theater. It would be designed by Philip Johnson and seat twenty-six hundred people.” This building would become the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. read more »
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Moody Merce, Chipper Cage: A Memoir of Movement
Mar. 11th, 2007
Memoir, cultural history, biography; choreographic catalogue raisonné, guide to dance technique read more »
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