The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Date
April 30, 2024
The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood.
Positive
Based on
7 reviews
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
What The Reviewers Say
If it were just a quest for cultural redress, the result might have been a dusty scroll of the Swans’ ballet bona fides. It’s by getting personal that it leaps high ... All of this is absorbing. Yet it’s the odd details that shine brightest ... Precisely because there’s so much meaning and humanity in this kind of minutiae, it has been methodically clipped from stories of Black women’s lives.
Read Full Review >>
Valby’s group biography, The Swans of Harlem, has a singular purpose: to write them back into history. She does so with righteous passion but in a narrative mishmash that jumps between third- and first-person, and includes some cloying comments from family members ... [The women's stories] range from working with Bob Fosse and on the movie The Wiz to a backstreet abortion, an abusive marriage, a conversion to Islam and alcoholism. As a result, the book feels overcrowded ... But this feels, rightly, like the beginning of a wider conversation.
Read Full Review >>
Thanks in part to her book, that history can be told with greater fidelity—a history to inspire dancers and dance enthusiasts alike.
Read Full Review >>
SIMILAR BOOKS
What did you think of The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History?
