Martha Graham's life spanned nearly a century. The world Martha Graham was born into was too small and too tight for her. Freedman gives the reader a history lesson in Victorian attitudes. Children were expected to sit up straight and wait for adults to direct them. Though George Graham was a loving man, he still was a Victorian father whose approval or disapproval would have impacted Martha's determination to study dance.

Absorbed in her own work, Graham was little affected by major events in society.

But young readers receive a mini lesson in the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the 1936 Olympics, and a glimpse of the censorship which attempted to stifle the avant guard.

But seeing them for what they are—prejudice and tyranny—Graham distances herself and her dance company from them.

The dance world Graham revolutionized had been determined by the geometric...