Ballroom Dancing: The Romance, Rhythm and Style

The book captures the essence of competitive ballroom dancing or what's now known as the Olympic-recognized "DanceSport". John Reynolds has done a great job in maintaining the views of the athletes and participants in ballroom dancing and profiles stars like Marcus & Karen Hilton, the "Torvill & Dean" of Ballroom/DanceSport. This book will hopefully continue to increase awareness to the general public that Ballroom Dancing is more than a social activity, but an Olympic-recognized sport.

The full-color photographs featured in this coffee-table book are very stunning; truly an adventurous backstage tour of the action/glamour world of championship ballroom DanceSports. The written content of the edition is very discriptive. Did not appreciate the clumsey double-truck layout of at least two large photographs. Poor layout!!! Reduce those large landscape-format photos to fit on one page, not on two pages. Eliminating those annoying two-page photos would have allowwed for extra action shots. Need specific captions of every photo. Didn't know if these were amateur, or professional dance couples. I didn't recognise most of the couples featured in the edition. The general content captions didn't work for me. Nonetheless, this edition is a welcomed addition to anyone's coffee-table library.

As a competition dancer, I enjoyed this book thouroughly. The text is rich, and captures the essence of the Ballroom Dance very well. Accurate in content, this book describes aspects of DanceSport in a way that is satisfying to dancers, and yet would be very enjoyable and informative to non-dancers. Covering everything from the evolution of social dances to the rigors of Blackpool competition, and from what to look for in respectable dance studio to the disussion of DanceSport as an Olympic event, the book is very complete. It is a must have for DanceSport enthusiasts. The photos are vivid, though I'd have liked some detail in the captions. If you don't dance now, you'll want to give it a try by the time you reach the back cover. Nicely done Mr. Reynolds.

I ballroom dance competitively, and bought this book based on pre-release word-of mouth. Some of the pictures are spectacular, while a very few others are marred by spreading across two pages and thus being bound into the book's spine. Not all pictures are captioned...it would have been nice to know who everyone was, and where they were when the picture was taken. But don't let my comments deter you -- the *text* of the book is wonderful, and the pictures are very good. I felt that the descriptions of and explanations about Dance Sport were very accurate in terms of how one would explain competitive ballroom dancing to someone who's never been part of it. As far as coffee-table books go, if you're a ballroom dancer you should definitely get it. And if you're not a competitive ballroom dancer, but are curious to get a sense of what it's all about, then do get this book because it's a great summary of the DanceSport world.