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Margot Fonteyn
A Life
by Meredith Daneman
Meredith Daneman, a novelist and former dancer, reveals the fascinating story of Peggy Hookham, a little girl from suburban England, who grew up to become a Dame of the British Empire and the most famous ballerina in the world. [Viking Books]
Viking Books, 654 pages
10/07/2004
$32.95
ISBN: 0670843709
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
The full story of her exceptional life and complex temperament has never before been told, and Daneman, a dancer and a novelist, seems to have been born to write this capacious and compulsively readable biography. [1 Nov 2004, p.458]
Daily Telegraph Laura Thompson
The best biographies are not merely stories of lives; they have a real life of their own. Meredith Daneman's Margot Fonteyn is such a book: the author achieves an astonishing imaginative fusion with her subject.
New York Observer Mindy Aloff
The book is undeniably riveting. The narrative is tightly plotted... , the writing gracious, informed and often wise, the pacing positively masterful.
The Economist
As an ex-ballerina, [Daneman] describes dancing with rare authenticity. Fonteyn's New York appearance in “Sleeping Beauty” in 1949 is thrillingly described.
The New York Times Book Review Toni Bentley
She has also captured on the page the power of nobility radiated by her subject, a woman so dedicated, so self-effacing, so stubborn and so loving that her story manages to attain by its tragic ending the same effect as one of her performances.
Chicago Tribune Alan Peter Ryan
Balletomanes and Anglophiles will positively swoon at the inside stories, the vibrant accounts of performances and curtain calls and ovations and showers of roses, all in addition to the book's rich detail and telling insights, and if the earth doesn't exactly move beneath your reading chair, it will certainly tremble just a little.
The New York Times Jennifer Dunning
Ms. Daneman sometimes goes to extraordinary lengths to express rather ordinary perceptions. But she has a wonderful ear and eye for detail.
The New Yorker
Probably the closest examination that could be made of the notoriously reticent English ballerina.
The Spectator Colette Clark
The second half of the book is the most thrilling. The account of the shooting and crippling of Margot’s husband, Tito Arias, in 1964, in Panama, her reactions to it, the subsequent story up to his death and her own terrible illness is brilliantly done.
New York Review Of Books Robert Gottlieb
Meredith Daneman has given us what, despite lapses of tone and judgment that are, perhaps, the inevitable price of so personal a labor of love, is certain to be the definitive Life.
Daily Telegraph Louise Levene
However much dirt is dished in this unflinching but always sympathetic biography, Daneman never loses sight of her book's driving force: the beauty and emotional truth of Fonteyn's dancing which floats forever in the mind's eye of every one of us who saw it.
Boston Globe Christine Temin
At 654 pages, this biography begs to be called ''definitive," and it is. It's so packed with the day-to-day, though, that you have to search out the grand themes.
Chicago Sun-Times Hedy Weiss
At turns fascinating and maddening.
The Guardian Judith Mackrell
It's one of the weaknesses of her book that it falls too readily into the magical writing and sentimental overload that are endemic to dance writing.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
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