Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.
Former Reuters journalist Eaves reflects on her years as an exotic dancer in Seattle, the path that led her there, and why she’ll never go back.
“I had a deep distaste for clothing as a child,” she tells us. Other than a fondness for nudity, however, Eaves seemed to exhibit few girlhood indicators for her eventual stage work, raised as she was by scholarly parents who emphasized the importance of intellectual achievement over all other. But it was this exclusive focus on the cerebral, the writer insists, that made her all the more determined to explore gender issues and sexuality, which began puzzling her as soon as she hit adolescence and was confronted with a seemingly arbitrary moral universe. Irritated by the rules required of nice girls, she became fascinated with what she perceived as the sexual freedom enjoyed by strippers. After graduating from college and moving in with her boyfriend in Seattle, she finally took the plunge and began dancing naked at the Lusty Lady. Twelve months passed and she gave it up, moved on, and got a graduate degree at Columbia; years later, however, she was driven to return to the exhibitionist profession to explore why, exactly, she’d done it in the first place. Her personal justifications for taking up dancing (pursuit of personal freedom and stereotype-busting) and giving it up (it was screwing with her behavior in relationships) are unremarkable. The strength of the work lies in her non-sensational, balanced look at her coworkers, with all of their singular histories, and at the backstage of a strip parlor, with the attendant headaches of workplace etiquette and labor relations.
Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41233-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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