The book is well-written and loaded with photos but tends to be repetitive—for which the author receives only partial blame:...
Zemeckis (Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America, 2013) chronicles the life of Lili St. Cyr (1918-1999), by all accounts the queen of the strippers.
St. Cyr, like so many in her business, scrabbled to break out of poverty. Luckily, her grandmother Alice remained a stabilizing influence in her childhood. She taught St. Cyr and her sisters to sew, an art they used in making costumes for the burlesque acts. What Alice also taught her was to go after what she wanted and forget whatever didn’t work. Unfortunately, St. Cyr never learned how to say no. She accepted every job offered to her, which kept her in the limelight. She also accepted marriage proposals, six of them. She didn't have the nerve to break up, though, waiting for her husbands to tire of being Mr. St. Cyr. Her work, her body, and her beauty were all she ever cared about. She was private, enigmatic, even shy, always emulating Greta Garbo. She never played to the audience, maintaining her air of mystery. The author has difficulty showing the inner St. Cyr because feelings were the one thing she never exposed. There were loves along the way, but an ex–hockey player was the only one she kept going back to, and he never proposed. St. Cyr loved meeting gangsters and marveling at their swagger; they adored and adorned her, and she ate it up. Friends were few, certainly no women (she never trusted them). Her dance routines played to packed houses, and it was her bathtub scene, using a well-placed towel held by her maid, that brought her lasting fame.
The book is well-written and loaded with photos but tends to be repetitive—for which the author receives only partial blame: St. Cyr’s life was one gig, one man, and one marriage/divorce after another.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-568-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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