ERRAND INTO THE MAZE: The Life and Works of Martha Graham, by Deborah Jowitt“Old age is a pain in the neck,” Martha Graham wrote in her 1991 memoir, “Blood Memory.” Death, though, has been good to her. Already in the 2020s there has been a book devoted to Graham’s Cold War activity and another (more sweeping) that a reviewer for The New York Times found fact-choked and unevenly paced. Deborah Jowitt’s “Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham” is, by contrast, a study in balance and grace. That girlish enthusiasm peeps through “Errand Into the Maze,” named for a 1947 work that premiered at the original Ziegfeld Theater. It is also Jowitt’s first book in almost 20 years, since a biography of another titan of the field, Jerome Robbins.

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Persons: Martha Graham, Deborah Jowitt “, ” Martha Graham, Gordon Bunshaft, Agnes de Mille, Deborah Jowitt’s, Martha Graham ”, Jowitt, Graham’s, Louis Horst, “, ”, Jerome Robbins, Graham, Horst, George Balanchine Organizations: New York Public Library, Performing Arts, The New York Times, The Village, Times, Cornish School Locations: Manhattan, ecstatically, Seattle