A humorous, gossipy account of an unusual lifestyle.
In this memoir, a woman looks back at five years of traveling and teaching kids in the circus.
Of everyone who’s ever run away to join the circus, Radcliffe—“a very proper fifty-year-old lady from academia” and former country-club member—is one of the unlikeliest. But after divorce and an unsuccessful stint as a Spanish teacher to “large classes of aspiring delinquents,” she started tutoring children in the entertainment industry and was then invited to apply for a teaching job with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Interested in new experiences, Radcliffe went for it. In her debut work, Radcliffe writes evocatively of cramped train compartments, bad smells, being too cold or too hot, and the difficulties of setting up classrooms anew in various towns. She reports on many behind-the-scenes glimpses of “the greatest show on earth”: the often troubled young men who do the heavy lifting; the performers’ routines and hierarchies; the seamy sides of many cities; and circus gossip, stories and scandals. Circus life, Radcliffe writes, is something like a village from centuries ago: Everyone knows “whose bastard the village drab had borne, who was stealing chickens, and whether the lord’s son preferred the shepherd, the shepherdess, or the sheep.” By the same token, “Circus children, on the whole, are warm, loving, and well-adjusted. These kids don’t just have one or two doting parents; they have more than three hundred.” Sometimes Radcliffe’s sympathies seem oddly placed. Writing of a cook who abandoned his family and joined the circus to avoid paying child support, she comments jauntily, “The circus won!” Hurray? She also breezily dismisses animal rights activists as “do-gooders” despite considerable evidence, including videos, of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey animals being abused with bullhooks, whips and electric prods. Elsewhere, though, Radcliffe is more sensitive to the darker undercurrents beneath the circus’s bright, spangled surface. In response to a jest, one of the guys says, “Hey, I’m not on the ten most-wanted list….I joined because nobody wanted me.” As Radcliffe says, “Sometimes a joke covers up a lot of pain.”
A humorous, gossipy account of an unusual lifestyle.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4827-0676-5
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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