by Eve Littlepage ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 22, 2012
An absorbing look at an often misunderstood profession.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
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
Share your opinion of this book
by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by David Hajdu
BOOK REVIEW
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.