Fosse
Sam Wasson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Fosse
Sam Wasson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Sam Wasson’s biography about the great dancer/choreographer/director Bob Fosse gave me the same sort of exuberant rush I get when I watch dance movies. This fast-paced, fascinating read (even at over 600 pages) also got me thinking about why we crave stories involving intense, often excruciating physical struggle in the pursuit of art.
...[a] fascinating and exhaustive biography.
Mr. Wasson is a smart and savvy reporter, and his book abounds with colorful firsthand tales.
The only thing that could have been better than Sam Wasson's page-turning, comprehensively rendered biography of choreographer-director Bob Fosse would have been Fosse's own memoir.
It’s that turn of phrase, 'harvesting the lightning that slays and illustrates so beautifully the thing separating this biography from that great big pile of others surrounding it—it is just so wonderfully well written. In addition, there is the aforementioned research. In this the author is scrupulous. The work is impeccable. Six hundred pages of insight and information and not an edit to be found. Six hundred pages that, in telling the life of Fosse, seem hardly enough. And oh, it is amazingly well written.
Fosse is filled with the kind of inside detail that comes of substantial research, and vivid descriptions that turn the research into a sort of movie in your head. All the way from little Bobby Fosse's elementary school disappointment when the spotlight faded on him, right through to the moment when Gwen Verdon, the love of his life, cradled Fosse's head on her lap on a D.C. sidewalk, just blocks from an audience he was at that very moment razzle-dazzling to beat the band..
...[a] scintillating biography.
...Wasson...has amassed a mountain of data about Fosse but has sculpted it into something moving and memorable. With chapters whose titles remind us of his approaching death...the author both increases the dramatic irony of the dancer’s days and reminds us continually of life’s evanescence.