Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century
by Jennifer Homans.
Random House, 769 pp., $40.00
If you order Jennifer Homans’s Mr. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, you might want to tell the delivery man to bring a hand truck. With the endnotes, nearly 1,500 of them, the book is close to eight hundred pages long. Balanchine deserves such coverage, though. His career spanned most of the twentieth century, during which time he created an estimated 425 ballets. He founded institutions: theaters, companies, schools—notably his own School of American Ballet, which opened in New York in 1934, and then New York City Ballet, the jewel in his crown, in 1948. What he left us, however, was not just institutions, but an Institution. Balanchine, it can be said, created American ballet, made this…