Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans

This book is fantastic. Homans faces a difficult task in describing the history of an art form which for much of its existence has been passed down from dancer to dancer instead of being recorded in some form of notation. She admits to these challenges from the beginning and meets them with style and grace. Homans theorizes that by tracking ballet's role in European cultural life, we can see larger political and cultural changes, and although she doesn't provide a grand theory explaining everything, she makes a great case for the relevance of ballet. Although she ends the book pessimistically, I think the effort she's put into telling ballet's story (and the apparent popular success) belie the point she makes at the end, namely that ballet's on its way out.