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In 2014, Misty Copeland became the first Black dancer to ever take the stage as Swan Queen in Swan Lake. The next year, she was promoted to principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, making her the first Black dancer to ever secure the role. She has been heralded as a prodigy and celebrated as a trailblazer. Yet in the first decade of her career, she was made to paint her face to look less like herself, less Black. White choreographers had long tried to steer her toward modern dance, where her skin color was more acceptable, and where she would not “break the line” of pale flesh. 

Today, large dance organizations boast diversity, equity and inclusion programming, and all dancers can finally find ballet tights and shoes that match their skin tone. Thanks to Copeland, other Black girls may not feel so alone in their unquenchable desire to dance classical ballet. 

But decades before Copeland took to the stage, as she frequently acknowledges, Black girls and women were performing to accolades all over the globe and in U.S. cities generally hostile to anyone of color. The change began in Harlem, when the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a Black dancer, Arthur Mitchell, to found his own ballet company. The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History is journalist Karen Valby’s spirited account of Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem, and of five principal dancers who, half a century after their time in the spotlight, formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council to tell their story. 

In 1968, Lydia Abarca was working as a bank secretary and about to enter Fordham University  on a partial scholarship. She had given up on ballet at 15, “tired of giving her whole self over to something that never seemed to love her back.” But a Black principal dancer teaching ballet in a neighborhood church basement lured her back in. Abarca’s mother, a part-time telephone operator, was skeptical, but her father, a janitor from Puerto Rico, did not object. So began Abarca’s rise to international fame. 

With respectful attention to their occasionally troubled lives, Valby introduces Abarca’s peers: Sheila Rohan, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells. Their “lighthouse,” Arthur Mitchell, is portrayed in his all-too-human complexity, fighting to keep his company funded and recognized, and his ballerinas under his thumb. Mitchell cast a long shadow over the dancers; he was their champion, teacher and employer—and their most unrelenting critic. 

Valby’s extensive interviews with the dancers lend an intimacy to the narrative, the details of their lives elevated and their perspectives clearly observed. The women of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council are determined to bring their story out of obscurity. In The Swans of Harlem, they become unforgettable.

Barbara Walters may forever be remembered as Barbara Wawa, thanks to Gilda Radner’s 1976 performance on “Saturday Night Live.” Radner, Rachel Dratch and Cheri Oteri played the character for the next four decades, illustrating that Walters and her contributions to television journalism had become enduring features of popular culture. Indeed, her presence would dominate television from the late 1960s to the early years of the new millennium.

Drawing on over 150 interviews and on extensive archival research, biographer Susan Page paints a colorful portrait of Walters in her compulsively readable The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Tracing Walters’ life and career from her childhood through her three failed marriages, her estrangement from her daughter and her groundbreaking interviews with celebrities and political figures, Page reveals an ambitious woman who reached the pinnacle of her profession, even as she was dogged by insecurities and fear of failure. Page describes how both Walters’ ambition and her fear were fueled by her father, an entrepreneur and impresario who opened several high-profile nightclubs in Boston, New York City and Miami, but whose gambling and often extravagant spending resulted in his professional failures. Page traces Walters’ early career, cutting her teeth as a publicist, Redbook staffer and host of the “Today” show. Her big breakthrough came in 1976 when ABC offered her a $1 million salary to co-anchor its evening news program. But she didn’t stay for long. Three years later, she became co-host of “20/20.” The rest is history. 

Walters is best known for penetrating interviews of political and entertainment figures, never shying away from asking probing, and sometimes regrettable, questions. She asked Ricky Martin about his sexuality before he came out publicly; pushed Fidel Castro to admit the impoverished state of Cuba when the leader touted his role in the country’s prosperity; and asked Monica Lewinsky how she planned to explain the Clinton scandal to her children. Walters pioneered the tell-all interview and took it to new heights with “The View,” which premiered in 1997. 

The Rulebreaker explores the cultural history in which Walters and her career developed and flourished. Readers will be compelled by this story of an American icon who shaped the expectations that viewers have of television news programs, and whose flair and penetrating approach revealed the private lives of the powerful and famous.