Overview

"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 cofounder 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."

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Reviews

"""[A] gorgeous biography."" -- ""People"" ""A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life."" -- ""Mikhail Baryshnikov, Latvian-American dancer, choreographer, and actor"" ""A magisterial biography...[a] serious act of cultural retrieval."" -- ""New York Times"" ""An intricate, meticulously researched biography...the definitive account."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"" ""Gorgeously written...Balanchine may have been a genius on an Olympian scale, but in Mr. B he's relentlessly, alluringly human."" -- ""Oprah Daily"" ""Magnificent...A riveting portrait of a genius whose life spanned the twentieth century."" -- ""Wall Street Journal"""

Author Information

Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for the New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed, bestselling Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet, Homans danced professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a scholar in residence and the founding director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts. Cassandra Campbell has recorded nearly two hundred audiobooks and directed many more. She has been nominated for and won multiple Audie Awards, as well as the prestigious Odyssey Award. She has received numerous starred audio reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards. Cassandra was also named a Best Voice by AudioFile for 2009 and 2010.

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