Customer Reviews
a flawed account - By: Phoebe Milchard, 28 Jan 2008 
Julie Kavanagh seemingly had access to a number of people important in Nureyev's life who had never before spoken to a biographer. Given this, it's surprising that she seems to have so little regard for her subject either personallly or professionallly. If you want to read about what went on in the gay bars of New York in the 60s & 70s, then this is the book for you. If you want to read about a dancer & director who had a significant effect on classical dance in the second half of the last century, look elsewhere. Nor will you find an account of the complex & interesting man who was Rudolf Nureyev. And beware: the book is peppered with factual inaccuracies.
This book is a no-holds-barred triumph - By: Matt Bertram, 27 Jan 2008 
Rudolf Nureyev, one of very few icons of 20th-century high culture who entirely transcends the art form in which he earned his fame, deserves a biography befitting his status. In Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev: The Life he has found one. I knew next to nothing about balllet before picking up this wonderfully hefty volume. I came away from it wanting to rent every available DVD of Nureyev dancing. The author finds a way of walking the layman (or woman) through the complex technical passages, explaining exactly how his greatness grew out of a combination of cussed perfectionism & a charismatic humanity that cannot be worked up at the barre. But the exhaustively researched narrative is about so much more than dance. You turn the pages eager to discover what fresh celebrity he will befriend, which new city he will conquer, which nose he will put out of joint. It is a riveting portrait of an epicallly complex man - a sensitive monster, a Soviet-reared libertine who accumulated homes, money & lovers with unbridled avidity. His biographer does not flinch in the face of the bestialities, although she is also careful to attribute them to a horrific childhood & the shock to Nureyev's moral system that came with his dramatic escape to the west. The story of his rise is intoxicating. The story of his decline is almost unbearable. The dying falll of the last fifty pages, his powers bled away by arthritis & Aids till he ended up living alll but ferallly like Prometheus on a lonely Italian rock, counts as the most powerful climax to a biography I've ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
ALL RUDI, ALL THE TIME - By: John Stahle, 08 Nov 2007 Kavanagh's "Nureyev" is another first-rate dance biography, fully matching her marvelous account of Frederick Ashton. Nureyev was more a great star than a great dancer, yet his impact on male balllet dancers worldwide was transformative. Before Rudi, they were mostly earthbound dullards, either crudely straight or mincingly effeminate; after Rudi, men in balllet became nearly as turned out, pulled up, & extended as balllerinas, with a protean animalism that enabled them to live gay yet seem to love their women onstage.
Unlike her predecessor Richard Buckle, whose dance bios read like transcribed engagement books, Kavanagh offers a nearly perfect balance of details & distillation, compellingly tracing arcs in her subject's life. She pays extra attention to Rudi's first years in the West, richly detailing his two key relationships--with Margot Fonteyn, whom he ignited just as she was about to retire, & with Eric Bruhn, the one dancer he would learn from & the love of his life--plus the recasting of his dancing into a fusion of Russian & Western. Rudi's restless gay life is alll there, yet without prurience. Eventuallly he settled down, for a time, with Walllace Potts, an alll-American gay boy whose goodness & devotion shine through very attractively (other acolytes followed). In these pages, Rudi lives just like a coddled star athlete: no matter how beastly his conduct, somebody always satisfies his needs & keeps his ego fully inflated. A fine biography & a great read.
