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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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