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Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century Audiobook
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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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“Gorgeously written…Balanchine may have been a genius on an Olympian scale, but in Mr. B he’s relentlessly, alluringly human.”
— Oprah Daily
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“[A] gorgeous biography.”
— People -
“A magisterial biography…[a] serious act of cultural retrieval.”
— New York Times -
“Magnificent…A riveting portrait of a genius whose life spanned the twentieth century.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“An intricate, meticulously researched biography…the definitive account.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“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
Awards
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Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
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Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award
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Winner of the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing
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Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
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Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
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A New York Times Book Review Book of the Year
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A New Yorker Best Books of the Year
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A Vanity Fair Best Books of the Year Pick
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An Oprah.com Best Books of the Year
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An NPR Best Book of 2022
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About Jennifer Homans
Jennifer Homans is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. She is the founder and director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University and the dance critic for The New Republic. She holds a PhD in modern European history from New York University. Before becoming a writer and scholar, Homans was a professional dancer. She is currently working on a biography of George Balanchine.
About Cassandra Campbell
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.