Depressing report of life in a hippie vaudeville caravan. According to trapeze-artist Chace, ``Chautauqua'' is the old-fashioned name for vaudeville tent-shows that toured America around the turn of the century. The shows died out when movies came around—that is, until the Flying Karamazov Brothers resurrected a Chautauqua in 1969 in the Pacific Northwest. Chace stumbled upon the caravan after years of independent vaudeville work in N.Y.C. and Paris as a tumbler, juggler, and tap dancer. Chautauqua offers all she desires: a vaudeville family; the chance to rub elbows with the best performers around; a romance with the group's founder, Paul Magid, a.k.a. Dmitri Karamazov. Chace burrows in as the troupe meanders through the summer from one small town to another, scaring or amusing the local populace, camping on land owned by Dugout Dick, The Hooey Man, and other unrepentant hippies. It's ``all very tribal,'' Chace reports: The group enjoys pseudo-Native American rituals; pointless gatherings (``the Circle turned into a meeting that lasted four hours. Most of that time was spent discussing whether or not we were having a `meeting' or a `Circle' ''); petty jealousies. The performers—Magical Mystical Michael (magician), Artis the Spoonman (musician), Toes Tiranoff (tap dancer), et al.- -wow the crowds with first-rate routines. Dmitri has it out with his estranged wife; someone puts garlic in the chewing gum; the starry-eyed troupe drops its pants to moon the moon. These juvenile antics are related in a flat voice almost devoid of affect: The few moments of intense emotion sound so contrived (``I could taste her pain in my mouth as the tears ran down my throat'') that they may provoke laughter rather than empathy. If this is vaudeville, it's easy to see why the Great Ones- -Will Rogers, Ed Wynn, Jack Benny, and the like—opted for the movies. About as appealing as a pie in the face.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-117011-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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