A briskly told story of two women questing for fame.
In the 1920s and '30s, showgirls worked hard, hustled, and competed in a brutal entertainment business.
Actress, filmmaker, and historian of burlesque Zemeckis (Goddess of Love Incarnate: The Life of Striptease Artist Lili St. Cyr, 2015, etc.) focuses on fan dancers Faith Bacon (1910-1956) and Sally Rand (1904-1979) and reveals their struggles, dreams, and glittery triumphs. Frances Yvonne Bacon was groomed and manipulated by an ambitious stage mother who pretended to be her sister and sometimes performed in the same shows. In her teens, Yvonne, who later changed her name to Faith, was one among many other young women “sought, hired, prized, and praised for the perfection of their figures.” Scantily clothed, resplendent in jewels and feathers, they paraded in “respectable, naughty” extravaganzas mounted by impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld or his competitor Earl Carroll, an egotistical “Hugh Hefneresque” figure. Broadway, the author writes, “was assaulted with ruthless promoters of beauty and flesh trying to one up the other.” The women they hired, though, were proud of their bodies and eager for admiration. At the age of 19, working for Carroll, Faith was “at her most luminous,” with “blue-grey eyes, winsome and doe-eyed with a slim alabaster figure.” In one of Carroll’s productions, she had an idea: to get around the law, which forbade a nude performer from moving on stage, she would dance covered with fans, then stop, raise them above her head, and reveal herself naked. The fan dance became her signature—until Hattie Helen Beck, aka Billie Beck, aka Sally Rand, performed it “to thunderous applause” at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Unlike Faith, who was emotionally fragile, Sally was resilient, enterprising, and unsinkable. Still performing at the age of 60, she remarked proudly, “what in heaven’s name is strange about a grandmother dancing nude?” Faith sued Sally, claiming ownership of the fan dance, but Sally prevailed. Widely acclaimed, she performed for some 7 million people throughout the world. Faith, addicted to barbiturates and destitute, killed herself.
A briskly told story of two women questing for fame.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-114-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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