The Ballet Lover exposes the beauty and cruelty of ballet, the performances, the back stage moments, and the personal dramas of the famous ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova as seen through the eyes of an American female journalist. Paris, 1970s: the orchestra plays the first ominous note of Swan Lake. In the audience sits Geneva, an American journalist and ballet lover, waiting for the heart-stopping beauty and seduction of the romantic duet to start, but instead she witnesses Rudolf Nureyev failing to catch his Russian partner Natalia Makarova, allowing her to fall with a crash upon the stage.
Geneva interprets the fall as an act of cruelty, a man with all the fame and power in the world brutally letting fall his delicate, wraith-like artistic partner. When other critics defend Nureyev and accuse Makarova of causing her own tumble, Geneva vows revenge on the page, creating havoc in her own career and discovering surprising parallels between herself and the fallen ballerina. The Ballet Lover is a refined, mesmerizing, fictional account of two of the most celebrated dancers in the dance world, how one compromised the other, and how the drama on the stage often mirrors those played out in real life.

The Ballet Lover

Literature & Fiction

Baer, Barbara L.

Genre Fiction

Open Books

Book by Barbara L.; Jennings, Maureen; Downing

Cartwheels on the faultline: Works by twenty-seven Sonoma County women

Floreant Press

We found the theme for Saltwater, Sweetwater, writing about our lives on California's North Coast, in the winter months of 1997. Author Suzanne Lipsett had recently died and environmental activist Judi Bari was gravely ill with inoperable cancer. The dozen women who had put together a first collection of writing, Cartwheels on the Faultline, retreated to the North Coast to envision another book. Losing Suzanne Lipsett and Judi Bari so young to breast cancer devastated and frightened all of us. Whether or not we knew them personally, their courageous lives and deaths touched everyone who read about them. Suzanne and Judi died at the most creative time in their lives, with major work ahead and young children who still needed them. Suzanne wrote and worked as an editor through a decade of illness. The bomb that had blown up under Judi Bari's car seat had crippled but not stopped her; she organized rallies, protested, wrote, and sang through pain. To hold Suzanne and Judi in our minds longer, to honor them, we would write about the places they loved, from what Suzanne called the Sonoma savannas, to the rugged beauty and ancient forests of the North Coast. These places gave Suzanne and Judi their inspiration and purpose. Our first collection, Cartwheels on the Faultline, had bubbled up with a fountain of ideas. Unlimited, unrestrained by a theme, the book could barely contain the voices of twenty-seven Sonoma County women writing about anything and everything we wanted to say. By contrast, Saltwater, Sweetwater has had a direction from the start and has grown like a river, deepening as it gathered in tributaries. Early on, Maureen Jennings and I recognized a curious unity running through many of the manuscripts we received. All the writers understood that we were dedicating the book to Suzanne and Judi and that every piece had to touch on or be about place. The writings were all regionally connected, but beyond that, a remarkable number of them were also about ghosts, about bridging the worlds of life and death. Many stories and memoirs and poems, even the funny ones, seemed haunted, as if resisting separation and loss. As we opened envelopes with manuscripts tucked inside, we wondered if we were calling to phantoms. Or were they calling us? Suzanne Lipsett knew that her last novel, Remember Me, was her finest, and the critics acclaimed it. She next published a memoir, Surviving a Writer's Life, that blended her evolution as an artist with an exploration of the difficulties that loving words and making a living as an editor had always presented. Suzanne's husband, Tom Rider, has given us one of the essays from a book she was completing before she died. Suzanne never stopped writing her own work or editing books for others. She connected many friends in Sonoma County who cared about literature. Judi Bari came to Mendocino County from the East in the late 1970s, fell in love with redwoods, and became the heart and the voice calling us to save the Headwaters Forest and all the old- growth groves on the North Coast. At Judi's memorial, people wore tee-shirts that said, Don't Mourn. Organize! Fionna Perkins, a long-time peace activist and environmentalist from Gualala, cautioned me, Don't make too much of Judi's death, focus on her life. She was not a martyr but a hero. We are donating part of the profits from our book to the Environmental Protection Information Center dedicated to preserving Headwaters Forests and the old-growth groves surrounding it. As we had done for Cartwheels, women in small groups met to read, encourage, question, and criticize each other's manuscripts. An editorial board considered all submissions in a blind reading, then made the selections together. Maureen and I edited the work. Marylu Downing painted the woman on the cover. She asked local artists for images of women, of forests and rivers, of sunny hillsides, and resting places like the Druids Cemetery in Occidental, where, last year, Nancy Farah, another beloved woman who died of cancer in her forties, was laid to rest. We chose our title when we saw how many of us were considering the sweet rivers of life flowing out to the sea. We hope that our readers will find and lose themselves in our stories about the places to which we are giving a writer's reality, the places we love and want to preserve, our places along California's North Coast. Barbara L. Baer 1997

Saltwater, Sweetwater: Women Write from California North Coast

History & Criticism

Floreant Pr

Passionate and forbidden love clashes with tradition and caste in a changing India.
Kamala Kumari is more than a Gemini Studio starlet: she’s a classical dancer trained in the age-old line of Devadasis, a caste set in place a thousand years ago when girls were first dedicated in south Indian temples to serve the gods and men. From the promise of art and devotion, the sacred dancers fell into the hands of priests who both exalted and betrayed them. Beautiful, brilliant and proud, Kamala struggles to escape the old ways, entangling her Indian assistant, Dutch lover, and his young American wife.
With its turbulent passions amid social upheavals, The Last Devadasi takes readers on a sensual feast in the 1970s palm-shaded trading city of Madras.

The Last Devadasi: A Novel

Literary

In the autumn of 1895, citizens of Leadville, Colorado construct the Ice Palace: a last sign of hope for the fading silver mining town. There, on New Year's Eve beneath the magic lights and frozen ramparts of this fantastic ice marvel, Max Selig and the Grensky brothers, enemies and rivals, watch the youngest members of their families, June Selig and Nathan Grensky, dance and fall in love.Across the country in New York City, the waning years of the Gilded Age and a failed stock market gamble crushes the dreams of the Greenbaums. Only vivacious, copper-haired Tillie can save her family from ruin by entering into a marriage of convenience.Two decades later, Tillie, resigned to a passionless marriage, encourages her daughter Margie to live the romance she was denied and take a chance on the dashing, hard-drinking newsman Tommy Grensky, the Leadville Ice Palace lovers' son. But when the young couple travels to London in 1937, they encounter a changing Europe under the rise of Nazism.In The Ice Palace Waltz, two Jewish immigrant families-the rough and ready Western pioneers and the smooth, "our crowd" New Yorkers-come together in a riveting family saga amid the financial and social tumult of early twentieth century America. Baer's moving multigenerational novel traces the American Jewish experience and the enduring power of family and love.

The Ice Palace Waltz