New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time by Thomas Bender

This book gives a comprehensive intellectual history of New York City. Bender contends that intellectual life in New York has always been different from Europe--so if we look for European structures, we'll be disappointed. Instead, he traces three types of intellectual involvement: civil, literary, and academic. He contends none of these structures has been completely successful in developing intellectual life, and that a city that could embrace all three would be ideal. In this book, Bender thinks a lot about the relations between intellectual life and democratic society, ultimately contending that intellectual life has to be open to all and a vibrant part of city culture for the optimal situation. I found this book very diligent in providing convincing evidence to support its arguments. The three trends are very clearly defined, but the book could trace their relationships to each other a little more clearly.

Night's Edge: Dancers in the Dark, Her Best Enemy, Someone Else's Shadow by Charlaine Harris, Maggie Shayne, and Barbara Hambly

This book collects three novellas about supernatural love affairs. All three were interesting (one about two dancers who show up peripherally in some of the Sookie Stackhouse books, one about a skeptic who's forced to believe in the supernatural when she buys a house with a murderous history, and one about a dancer haunted by a fire at an old factory), but none were particularly noteworthy. I found the historical part of the last one particularly nice.

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.