An affectionate and historically valuable document of an intriguing, little-served corner of American entertainment.
The salty reminiscences of participants in the classic age of burlesque enliven this companion volume to a documentary film directed by the author.
Zemeckis assembled an impressive number of surviving performers from roughly the 1930s through the late ’50s to recount their experiences toiling in this often misunderstood cul-de-sac in American performing arts. An evolution of vaudeville, burlesque added striptease to the program in an effort to lure audiences back from the movies by giving them something unavailable on the silver screen. Such luminaries as Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm and Dixie Evans dish on backstage rivalries, the depredations of the road, the stigma of stripping and all other aspects of burlesque life, providing an engaging behind-the-scenes analysis of an art form most people have heard of but few understand. In fact, the performers themselves contribute contradictory perspectives, describing the shows variously as bawdy but innocent escapism for cash-strapped regular folks or exploitative flesh parades with audiences full of men furtively masturbating behind newspapers. However, the interviewees share a common spirit of toughness and rueful good humor, which jibes with their status as, in the main, poverty-stricken young women who could earn more disrobing than waiting tables. A defiant pride in burlesque's second-rate status in the entertainment firmament—the performers may not have had the goods to make it in “legitimate” venues like the movies or Broadway, but they left the audiences happy—also unites the subjects, who take poignant pride in their brief moments of relative fame. The narrative moves briskly and will engross anyone interested in midcentury Americana. There is much colorful ground-level showbiz detail and descriptions of what it was like to work circuses, carnivals and the rotating theatrical circuit known as “The Wheel,” and the anecdotes are never less than good fun.
An affectionate and historically valuable document of an intriguing, little-served corner of American entertainment.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-691-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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