A fast-paced, funny, flavorful reckoning with a unique American icon.
Abbott (Sins in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul, 2008) presents a rollicking account of Gypsy Rose Lee (1911–1970), the legendary striptease artist who titillated legions and battled her monstrous stage mother Rose, a gorgon of a woman who would make Medea blanche.
Lee endured a childhood of ghastly deprivation, criss-crossing the country in various Vaudeville acts featuring her younger, cuter and more talented sister June. Stocky and boyish, Louise, as she was known, developed a keen mind and sly sense of humor, armor against the psychological abuse doled out by Mama Rose, who, convinced of her younger daughter’s star potential, favored June unconscionably, treating Louise as an afterthought at best. After June suffered a breakdown and left the act, Rose focused her attention on the elder girl, who, through sheer force of will, transformed herself into a national sex symbol and revolutionized the art of burlesque. Mama Rose is the tale’s most compelling character, a con artist, thief and probable murderer who emotionally dominated and manipulated her daughters with apparent relish, a Dickensian harridan who in her declining years watched pornographic movies to unwind, chuckling at the “funny” bits. Abbott writes in a propulsive, witty style, jumping back and forth in chronology and limning a vivid portrait of Lee’s milieu, lovingly rendering the Tammany Hall politicians, gangsters, Algonquin Round Table habitués and theatrical promoters that constituted Lee’s world. Running concurrently with Lee’s story is that of the Minsky brothers, whose burlesque house became a New York institution and served as the setting for the introduction of Gypsy Rose Lee, the teasing, intellectual beauty with the razor-sharp instinct for what to reveal and what to hide. Lee’s success—she would publish novels, act in films and write an autobiography that would serve as inspiration for one of Broadway’s most enduring triumphs—was sweet, but Mama Rose, long after her death, would haunt her daring daughter to the grave.
A fast-paced, funny, flavorful reckoning with a unique American icon.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6691-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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