My Life [Paperback]

Isadora Duncan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 1996

Unquestionably brave, creative, and erudite, the free spirit Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) captivated the American, European, and Soviet cultural scenes with her innovative modern dance and un-self-conscious lifestyle.

My Life, the classic autobiography first published just after Duncan's death, is a frank and engrossing life account of this remarkable visionary and feminist who took on the world, reinvented dance, and led the way for future great American modernists Ruth St. Denis, Agnes de Mille, and Martha Graham.Documenting Duncan's own life as a dancer and as a woman—from her enchantment with classical music and poetry as a child in San Francisco and her intense study of classical Greek art in Athens, through the great strides she made in teaching, founding schools, performing, and collaborating with international artists, to her notorious love affairs and the tragic deaths of her own children—My Life reissued here is still as extraordinary as the woman who wrote it more than sixty years ago.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fabulous is the only adjective that comes close to doing justice to Isadora Duncan (1878-1927). Her awesomely self-assured autobiography depicts a woman who while still in her teens tells an eminent theatrical manager (from whom she desperately needs a job), "I have discovered the art that has been lost for two thousand years.... I bring you the dance." In Duncan's rendering of her life, composers fling themselves at the piano and compose new music for her on the spot. Men pine for her love (the book's sexual frankness, while hardly startling today, was considered quite scandalous in 1927). And the poor mortals who can never understand her need to be free can at least applaud wildly at her concerts. Duncan and her siblings sleep in a bare Parisian attic, then dance barefoot through the Luxembourg Gardens. They travel to Greece to worship "in the Sacred Land of Hellas," where they build their very own temple. Duncan is capable of seeing the humor in her rhapsodic immersion in art, but we don't really want her to be realistic and self-deprecating like ordinary mortals. It's her divine passion, her supreme confidence in her own genius that make My Life such fun to read. --Wendy Smith

Review

“Isadora was a wild voluptuary, a true revolutionary. She flouted every tradition. . . . She alone and unhelped changed the direction of her entire art.” (Agnes de Mille )

“Fascinating, even sensational reading.” (New York Times )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Liveright (March 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871401584
• ISBN-13: 978-0871401588
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #220,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loved this biography of a flawed but brilliant woman., January 2, 1998

By 

"cazzer65" - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life (Paperback)

Isadora Duncan was a trailblazer and this book details her life and how she became the unique woman and artist that she was. Her story is fascinating not only because she was one of the originators of modern dance but because her flaws and her ego are so obviously present in the text. This only serves to make her more fascinating and when she writes about the loss of her child or the efforts to keep the flame of love alive, every man and woman can identify with her.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars patchy, September 12, 2000

By 

Vince Cabrera (Wellington, NZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life (Paperback)

An autobiography is a way of looking inside a person's mind. We have no real right to expect objectivity or "the long view" on any given subject.

Isadora Duncan's autobiography is a terrific example of the above. She was a hugely talented, flamboyant individual who chose to march to her own drummer from an early age. She is passionate in her descriptions of her inner life, her career and her lovers and changed the whole concept of "The Dance", breaking away from ballet (which she considered ugly and contrived) and inventing what we'd call "modern dance".

She was a fantastic dancer, but as a writer she is far too interested in her own inner world. The people around her float by as a succesion of badly defined cardboard cutouts, and one visited city sounds much like any other. After a while this DOES get rather boring. The lack of dates (such as "that was in 1925" or whatever) or a neatly defined chapter structure means that it's pretty hard to keep track of the passage of time. In the end, reading this book becomes a bit of a struggle: it's like being stuck in a someone's rather boring dreamworld.

Her sollipsism is (at times) a bit of a hoot and her inability to perceive the world for what it is provide the reader with occasional bits of unintentional black comedy.

An example: after deciding that ancient Greece was the mother of all art, Isadora sunk a great deal of her money in trying to rebuild a Greek temple. Her family spoke no Greek but lived for months amid the ruins, performing dances and wearing togas while getting cheated by the local villagers. She also formed a chorus of Greek urchins to perform ancient music and was later disappointed when during a tour, the urchins begin growing up and staying out late and coming home drunk.

A more human writer would have managed a bit of irony, a touch of sympathy for these common, simple people caught up in the mad American artist's vision, but Isadora never quite manages it. Sadly, it is precisely this sort of self-centered and humourless viewpoint that makes this book so stodgy.

On the positive side, however, one DOES get a really good idea of what Isadora Duncan was like and how she saw her art and one can't really ask for more from an autobiography.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars her life-isadora duncan, January 29, 2000

By 

rosie o'donnell (Derry,Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life (American Biography Series) (Library Binding)

As a keen fan of autobiographys this book automatically appealed to me. although I had not heard of Isadora's profound infleunce on the world of art or dance, the reviews on the book sold it for me. I thouroughly enjoyed her abstract and sometimes perplexing stories about her up- bringing. However as her travels with her family increased i found her to be quite selfish and single-minded in regards to her career. This i felt led her story, although a biography, to become quite a monotonous and tedious read. In her favour I would say that the book is written in an honest and frank manner.