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Rating: 
Summary: interesting, revealing
Review: I loved the book even though at points it was hard to follow. Sometimes it got a little too confusing with lot of russian names and positions. But it was great reading about her life and ballets.
Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous!!
Review: Read this and know what a great artist is all about. She is the ballerina par excllence, and Makarova would agree.Her dying swan was so overwhelingly great in person, which I saw three times, that audiences yelled for thirty minutes for her to just bow to them again and again. She repeated the dying swan or part of it at one performance I attended and there was pandemoinium. Her arms are perfect wings, waving naturally in the winds that she made you belive in. She metamorphosed herself into a swan before our eyes. Indeed, her other ballet scenes were of the smae magnitude. Her examples from Giselle, Manon Lescaut etc. made huge fans out of haters of ballet. When we went back stage to get autographs there were over a thousand people waiiting to see her, touch, applaud her once more. To read her book is to know the horrors of the Soviet system of old, with its repression of people like her. We had only small samples of her art, and now her great Autobiography...Plisetskaya will live forever in the records of ballet, even Nureyev and Barishnikov in thier spheres can only touch her greatness..Makarova is the closet , very much so, but Madame Plisetskaya is the ballet Diva of the universe, and this book will help you see why. There are films of her dancing that mezmerize, even through the weirdness of TV imagery and snow. Buy this book and begin to know about the art of ballet by its supreme practioner.
Rating:
Summary: A great story by a great ballerina
Review: Written with honesty, in a personal and intimate way, this is the fascinating yet horrifying story of life for the foremost ballerina in Russia under Stalinist, and after his death, equally cruel communist rule. While she was being used to show off the brilliance of Russian ballet, dancing for visiting foreign dignitaries, she was followed, spied on, given little money, and for fear of defection, not allowed to leave the country with the rest of the Bolshoi company.
Although by then she was in her forties, I was lucky enough to have seen her dance here in the USA and in Paris. Her 'Odette/Odile' and her 'Dying Swan' were, I think, the best in the history of dance. Her book is a page-turner. I couldn't put it down.
I also highly recommend the videotape, "Plisetskaya Dances". Wait til you see her leaps where her foot touches the back of her head!
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