“Isadora Duncan is one of the greatest women
I have ever known … Sometimes I think she IS the greatest woman I have ever
known.” – Auguste Rodin
“It is quite certain that no other American
woman has so impressed the world outside of America—made such a mighty stir,
commanded such a following at home and abroad . . . left behind her such a
legend of personality and such a trail of effects." – New York Times, 1928
"Come away! her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous
world! Come up on the mountain-top where
the great wind blows! Learn to be young
always! Learn to be incessantly
renewed! Learn to live in the
intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join
the passionate spirits of the world’s history!
Storm through into your dreams!
Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never
look back, and never regret!" – Robert Edmond Jones (“The Gloves of
Isadora”), 1947
"We
may never know whether 'one must have seen Isadora Duncan to die happy,' as one of her
contemporaries claimed, but one way to live happily, at least for a few days,
is to read Peter Kurth's Isadora. Exhaustively researched, intelligently
rendered, it becomes, in its lovingly judicious and ultimately explosive
unfurling, the definitive portrait of this — in the words of one of the few men not her lover — 'figure of mourning and flame.'" — J. D. Landis, author of Longing
"The
most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary
Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious, was Isadora
Duncan. She was the progenitor and soul
of a new art form, modern dance. She was
the prototype of the uninhibited young American whose freshness and originality
charmed jaded old
"Peter
Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often
underrated woman. He writes so well that
only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s
amplitude. … Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy,
he succeeds in making you love, hate and honor America’s greatest dancer,
sometimes all at once. Earlier
biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did. Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits
of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus. … Shrewdly, he gives space not only to
Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the creator of the scarf that
throttled her, but to
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