Dance
For many years Whistlestop Bookshop has been a strong supporter of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, from its original genius-dreamer Marcia Dale Weary to the dazzling and dynamic institution that it is today. Cumberland County is now home to several studios of dance, and we welcome and support all of them. I particularly admire dance for a counter-intuitive reality: it is a bookish art even as it abstracts beauty and grace from physics and human movement. Great writing about dance surrounded it from the beginning, great photography is drawn to it, and artwork for both adults and children celebrates it. We welcome dancers throughout the year, we welcome their brave and heroic families, and we welcome the opportunity to stock wonderful books about the art.
Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century
Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century
“A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
Based on a decade of unprecedented research, the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called “the Shakespeare of dancing”—from the bestselling author of Apollo’s Angels
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century—The New York Times called him “the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances.
Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriages—all to dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.
With full access to Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.