Book picks similar to
Days with Ulanova by Albert E. Kahn
music-dance
theatre_plays_bal<br/>let_opera_music
biographies-of-women
dances-ballet
Once in a Lifetime
Moss Hart - 1960
(doubling possible.) / 5 ints. or unit set. Recently revived on Broadway to great acclaim, this is the rollicking tale of three down and out troupers who decide to head for Hollywood and try their luck with the newly invented talkies. Due to a series of consistent blunders, the most stupid of the three is carried to pinnacles of fame and fortune until he's literally made a god of the industry. It's a fast paced and wild romp and a marvelous spoof of tinsel land.
Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir
Jean Trumpington - 2014
In this characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mother's fortune. Leaving school at 15, without ever taking an exam, the young Jean Campbell-Harris was sent to Paris to study art and both French and German, but two years later, with the outbreak of World War II, she became a land girl—on a farm owned by Lloyd George, a family friend—however, she soon changed direction, joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war she worked first in Paris and then in New York, on Madison Avenue, with advertising's "mad men." It was in New York that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life—bringing up her only son, Adam, and becoming a not entirely conventional headmaster's wife, before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge, and, then, in 1980, a life peer. Forthright, witty, and deliciously opinionated, Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived.
The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal
Mark Ribowsky - 2008
He sheds light on Diana Ross’s relationship with Berry Gordy and her cutthroat rise to top billing in the group, as well as Florence Ballard’s corresponding decline. He also takes us inside the studio, examining how timeless classics were conceived and recorded on the Motown “assembly line,” and considers the place of Motown in an era of cultural upheaval, when not being “black enough” became a fierce denunciation within the black music industry.Deftly combining personal testimony, history, and expert analysis, Ribowsky not only tells the full, heartbreaking story of the Supremes, but shows why Gordy’s revolutionary concept of “blacks singing white” was essential to the modern evolution of music.
Sonata Forms
Charles Rosen - 1980
Charles Rosen says of sonata form#58; "[It] is not a definite form like a minuet, a da capo aria, or a French overture; it is, like the fugue, a way of writing, a feeling for proportion, direction, and texture rather than a pattern."
Virginia Woolf
Mary Ann Caws - 2002
Many of the accompanying illustrations showing Woolf and intimates from the famed Bloomsbury Circle-which included economist John Maynard Keynes and biographer Lytton Strachey-are published here for the very first time, along with other rare photos and po
Isabella Blow: A Life in Fashion
Lauren Goldstein Crowe - 2010
The key supporter and muse of milliner Philip Treacy and designer Alexander McQueen, Blow was truly more than a muse or patron. She was a spark, an electrical impulse that set imaginations racing, an individual who pushed others to create their best work.Her fascination with clothing began early, as did a willingness to wear things—and say things—that would amuse and shock. She began her fashion career in New York City as assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue. Over time she became famous for her work, yet it wasn't enough to assuage her devastating feelings of inadequacy. Still, in her darkest moments, even as she began a series of suicide attempts and prolonged hospital stays, Blow retained her wicked sense of humor, making her friends laugh even as they struggled to help.Lauren Goldstein Crowe has crafted a superbly entertaining narrative; wrapping the anecdotes of Isabella's antics around a candid, insightful portrayal of a woman whose thirst for the fantastical ultimately became irreconcilable with life in the real world.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
Lisa Immordino Vreeland - 2011
Beginning in 1936, when she became a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Vreeland established herself as a controversial visionary with an astonishing ability to invent and discover fashion ideas, designers, personalities, and photographers. She was a memorable writer with a vivid personality and a talent for coining aphorisms. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel chronicles 50 years of international fashion and Vreeland’s rich life. With more than 350 illustrations, including original magazine spreads and many famous photographs, this intensely visual book shows fashion as it was being invented, and how Vreeland shaped American taste through her superb vision.Praise for Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel:“Before there was Daphne Guinness, before there was Lady Gaga, there was the original style setter. A new book takes a look at the career and influence of the woman who made fashion modern.” —Town & Country “A must-have and the perfect addition to anyone’s holiday gift list, the book begs to be displayed on a coffee table and leisurely reviewed from the corner of a comfy couch, when there is ample time to savor Vreeland's pioneering five decades in fashion.” —Publishers Weekly
Giants of Jazz
Studs Terkel - 1957
Now reissued in the original illustrated edition, the stars portrayed include John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday & Fats Waller.
The Water Theatre
Lindsay Clarke - 2010
Things are powerfully on the move inside him too as he comes to the small village of Fontanalba, on a mission to track down two friends from a lifetime ago.
The Wendy Williams Experience
Wendy Williams - 2004
But we'll let her speak for herself:Whitney Houston: We have watched her go from our princess...to what looks like one step above a crackhead.Lil' Kim: [She] started out as a black girl from the hood and now she's posing as a white girl from Hollywood.Mariah Carey: Mariah will deny all day that she has ever had any plastic surgery...Check the before-and-after photos.Star Jones and Al Reynolds: I give it three years.
Madeline Kahn: Being the Music, A Life (Hollywood Legends Series)
William V. Madison - 2015
In private, she was as reserved and refined as her characters were bold and bawdy. Almost a Method actor in her approach, she took her work seriously. When crew members and audiences laughed, she asked why--as if they were laughing at her--and all her life she remained unsure of her gifts.William V. Madison examines Kahn's film career, including not only her triumphs with Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich, but also her overlooked performances in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother and Judy Berlin, her final film. Her work in television--notably her sitcoms--also comes into focus. New York theater showered her with accolades, but also with remarkably bad luck, culminating in a disastrous outing in On the Twentieth Century that wrecked her reputation on Broadway. Only with her Tony-winning performance in The Sisters Rosensweig, fifteen years later, did Kahn regain her standing.Drawing on new interviews with family, friends, and such colleagues as Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Gene Wilder, Harold Prince, and Eileen Brennan, as well as archival press and private writings, Madison uncovers Kahn's lonely childhood and her struggles as a single woman working to provide for her erratic mother. Above all, Madison reveals the paramount importance of music in Kahn's life. A talented singer, she entertained offers for operatic engagements long after she was an established Hollywood star, and she treated each script as a score. As Kahn told one friend, her ambition was "to be the music."
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life
Linda Wagner-Martin - 2004
Using cultural and gender studies as contexts, Wagner-Martin brings new information to the story of the Alabama judge's daughter who, at seventeen, met her husband-to-be, Scott Fitzgerald. Swept away from her stable home life into Jazz Age New York and Paris, Zelda eventually learned to be a writer and a painter; and she came close to being a ballerina. An evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, this study contains extensive notes and new photographs.
Complete Piano Sonatas, Volume 1 (Nos. 1-15)
Ludwig van Beethoven - 1935
Volume One contains the fifteen sonatas from Beethoven's first period, including the popular Pathétique, Moonlight, and Pastorale sonatas. Volume Two contains the 17 sonatas from Beethoven's second and third periods, including the Waldstein, the Appassionata, and the Hammerklavier.The music is reproduced directly from the exemplary Universal Edition set edited by Heinrich Schenker. Combining scrupulous scholarship and profound artistic vision, Schenker achieved an edition which is universally admired by musicians and scholars. He used more autographs as sources than any previous editor of the sonatas, and he was the first to reproduce in print the visual impression of the autographs. For this Dover edition, Schenker's footnotes have been translated into English and his preface translated. A new introduction by Carl Schachter has also been included.Noteheads have been reproduced in a size large enough to be read easily at the keyboard. Margins and spaces between staves are generous, permitting insertion of written notes, analysis, fingerings, etc. Running measure numbers and many fingerings have already been included by the editor — the last a particularly unusual and valuable feature of this edition. This edition will be welcomed by all pianists, both professional and amateur, for its accuracy and reliability; it is highly desirable for instruction, study, reference, and enjoyment.
The Great American Love Story of George and Barbara Bush
Ellie Leblond Sosa - 2018
Though that home is a heavily protected compound and her grandparents are George and Barbara Bush, life at the Bush family home was not that different from most American families, with football and tennis matches, taco Tuesdays, and holiday gatherings. The Bushes always made a deliberate effort to connect and be involved with their small Maine community, attending church, going for walks, watching parades, and they have become beloved members of that community. In this highly readable biography, Sosa and co-author Kelly Anne Chase explore the enduring relationship of George and Barbara Bush. From its heady beginnings at the outbreak of World War II, through his time in the Navy and his long career of service, they trace the Bushes' 75-year love affair. Sharing intimate interviews with the Bushes and family friends, this is a never-before-seen look into the private life of a very public couple.
Tallulah!
Joel Lobenthal - 2004
In 1917, a fifteen-year-old Bankhead boldly left her established Alabama political family and fled to New York City to sate her relentless need for attention and become a star. Five years later, she crossed the Atlantic, immediately taking her place as a fixture in British society and the most popular actress in London's West End. By the time she returned to America in the 1930s, she was infamous for throwing marathon parties, bedding her favorite costars, and neglecting to keep her escapades a secret from the press. At times, her notoriety distracted her audience from her formidable talent and achievements on stage and dampened the critical re-sponse to her work. As Bankhead herself put it, "they like me to 'Tallulah,' you know -- dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts." Still, her reputation as a wild, witty, over-the-top leading lady persisted until the end of her life at the age of sixty-six.From her friendships with such entertainment luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Estelle Winwood, Billie Holiday, Noël Coward, and Marlene Dietrich, to the intimate details of her family relationships and her string of doomed romances, Joel Lobenthal has captured the private essence of the most public star during theater's golden age. Larger-than-life as she was, friends saw through Bankhead's veneer of humor and high times to the heart of a woman who often felt second-best in her father's eyes, who longed for the children she was unableto bear, and who forced herself into the spotlight to hide her deep-seated insecurities.Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews, as well as previously untapped information from Scotland Yard and the FBI, this is the essential biography of Tallulah Bankhead. Having spent twenty-five years researching Bankhead's life, Joel Lobenthal tells her unadulterated story, as told to him by her closest friends, enemies, lovers, and employees. Several have broken decadelong silences; many have given Lobenthal their final interviews. The result is the story of a woman more complex, more shocking, and yet more nuanced than her notorious legend suggests.