An absorbing look at an often misunderstood profession.
A former stripper recounts her experiences on and off the stage.
Debut author Littlepage was a small-town girl who attended Catholic school and excelled academically, despite the fact that her parents were alcoholics and that her mother had a touch of tyranny in her, perhaps the result of her own frustrated aspirations. Littlepage eventually left home with her boyfriend, Eddie, and they headed to Cape Cod. Littlepage kept them afloat with her earnings as a waitress, but Eddie was a compulsive gambler and a criminal, as well as physically abusive. The author turned to stripping—doubling her income—and found the strength to leave Eddie and start anew. Stripping would remain her principal source of income for a decade—through several relationships, a marriage, an abortion, the tragic deaths of two close friends, and plenty of experimentation with drugs and alcohol. The author, aware that every dancer’s career has an early expiration date stamped upon it, started planning her departure from the stage, taking acting classes, and exploring new business opportunities, eventually finding she had a talent for organizing charity fundraisers. Along the way, there is plenty of drama—one night, a co-worker pulled a gun on her; another stripper confessed her attraction to her. The author’s remembrance is a philosophical one; there are numerous references to I Ching, the guidance she finds in the Wiccan view of nature, and her devotion to the study of alternative spirituality. The entire memoir turns on a peculiar literary device: Eve Littlepage (a nom de plume) contacts a writer, Stella Mars (who is a fictional character) to co-author her book. It’s not entirely clear what purpose this fictional element serves, but it does end up feeling peculiarly self-referential, like hearing someone talk about herself in the third person. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful reflection on the psychology and stagecraft of stripping, as well as a commentary on the nature of modern female sexuality. Also, Littlepage’s life easily satisfies the most basic condition of the readable memoir: it is genuinely memorable.
An absorbing look at an often misunderstood profession.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-615-73554-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Littlepage Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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