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Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry |
Author: Juliet McMains
Published: 2006-11-17 |
List price: $28.95
Our price: $19.11
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As of: August 28th, 2008 06:27:19 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A Thought Provoking Book
I disagreed with some of the author's ideas, but I'm giving the book five stars anyway, because I enjoyed how thought-provoking it was. The part that I disagreed with particularly was in how much dance is an addiction. It's true, we dancers spend a lot of money and a lot of time on our hobby. In my case, if I have spare time and spare money, it's going into dance lessons and costumes. But I have a friend who is a golfer, and his spare time and money goes into golfing. Same with my bridge-playing friend, who travels to tournaments all over the world. And how about my mathematician friend who loves numbers so much that he went deeply into debt to get a PhD in mathematics? Today he loves his numbers so much that if it were a question of a hot date or an evening with his equations, I think the hot date would win out, but I can't be sure. Are these people addicted? Or is it more simply that in a capitalist economy, people have more spare time and more spare money than ever before, and they're going to spend these resources in the ways that give them the most pleasure?
Anyway, I loved the book. It was thought-provoking as well as full of new information.
 Great book
This was a great very current book. It had in it current dancers from "Dancing with the Stars" that has everyone now interested in ballroom dancing. It was great to konw the history and the current goings on in ball room
Unfortunately accurate
After going to a few DanceSport competitions in Australia and watching West Coast Swing competition on DVD I came to similar conclusions as the author of this book. While dance schools in Australia are not in my experience anywhere near as cynical and manipulative as those in the USA, Dancesport itself suffers from many of the same failings. Dancesport takes itself way too seriously. From the overdone fake tans to the grotesque caricatures of emotion ("face acting") to the hugely expensive costuming to the greased back hair and the parents whose egos are invested in their child winning, it is all a bit much. WCS seems to have more of a sense of humour, the costuming is more accessible and there is greater emphasis on actual dance skills in terms of partnering and musicality. And WCS competitors actually seem to genuinely enjoy dancing. So few Dancesport competitors seem to enjoy social dancing that you have to wonder why they bother dancing at all! Having said that, Dancesport does deliver some benefits: teenager competitors have a poise, style and standard of grooming and behavior that will benefit them in other areas of their lives, for example. My one criticism of this book would be its references to cultural theory (e.g. the discussion of 'the grotesque')which to me seems to be a vacuous ideology disguising its lack of any conceptual depth with fancy words. Ironically culture theory is open to many of the same criticisms as Dancesport: all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas!
 disappointment
I was exited to find a book that would give me some insight into the world of ballroom dancing. While this book does that, to some extent, it's written more in the format of a college thesis, rather than an informational and entertaining book for the masses. The text is dense with obscure vocabulary, and reads as redundant in many places. I found myself skimming, rather than reading. And that, for me, is a disappointment.
 Biased
I would go so far as to say prejudiced. As a devoted ballroom student for 10 years, I was happy to see any more-or-less mainstream book that treated ballroom dancing as something other than a fad, but only the glamorous cover photo of Jonathan Roberts and Anna Trebunskaya has lasting value for me. ... Evidently the author was so disillusioned by her experience as a professional ballroom dancer that she was unable to approach the subject with any objectivity. Her reliance on anecdotal "evidence" presented through composite characters is sloppy research; no broad studies or even surveys are presented. ... Numerous minor errors of fact and occasionally careless editing throughout, but the book's great flaw is that it looks - as apparently did the author during her dancing career - to ballroom dancing to provide, for its practitioners, all that is good in life - and then blames the sport for failing to do so. Those who go into ballroom dancing looking for a little glamour are, in my view, to be applauded; there is precious little glamour available to most of us in our daily lives. That in addition to being a popular social activity it is also a viable worldwide sport shows that a lot of people are indeed getting what they want out of dancing. The author should have talked to some of them.
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