Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
I wrote...
Alla Osipenko: Beauty and Resistance in Soviet Ballet
Behrman emerged in the 1920s as one of America’s most original playwrights, peopling his drawing-room comedies with a cross-section of archetypal American cultural and political viewpoints.
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Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places were they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering…
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Immortalizes Damon Runyon in a biography of the Roaring Twenties journalist who covered the Mexican Revolution, World War I, the Lindbergh kidnapping, sports and theater
I think it was the first biography I ever purchased. At age ten or eleven, I read in it, but now I’m reading it all the way through, and I’m pleased to say that even at that tender age, I gravitated to the best!
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“A book that will leave few readers unmoved.”–San Francisco Chronicle
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Now 92, Russian ballerina Alla Osipenko was one of the greatest of the great. In the late 1990s, it was my pleasure to make around 40 trips from New York City to Hartford, Connecticut, to interview Osipenko, who was then teaching and coaching at the Hartford Ballet and its school.
This was her belated American debut and a somewhat bittersweet one. Years earlier, her confrontations with Soviet authorities meant that her travel became restricted and, much to her chagrin, she’d never been allowed to dance in America. Our conversations form the basis of my biography, as she recalls in frank detail her art, her life, and her cultural and political context.
"an intense narrative of family and intangible inheritance. . .this novel unfolds like a fragrant, steeped tea." -Chanticleer Book Reviews, 5 Stars
"like a glorious sunrise, we are gifted the 'après,' the hope and goodness of 'after me.'" -Maria Giuseppa, author of R&R: A Feast of Words
A man in France receives a package from America containing an autobiographical manuscript relating the events of a summer long ago.
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A man in France receives a package from America containing an autobiographical manuscript relating the events of a summer long ago.
When Ellande and Madeleine-Grace visit the family summer house on the Alabaster Coast of Normandy for the first time without their parents, they find themselves growing aware of the importance of their parents' choices in raising them. Under the care of their beloved Aunt Adèle, they explore their heritage and what their parents stood for while determining the value of customs and traditions of both family and France's stunning Pays de Caux. In the face of cruelty, carelessness, and…
