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American Sideshow
A fascinating look into the history of the American sideshow and its performers Learn what's real, what's fake, and what's just downright bizarre. You've probably heard of Tom Thumb. The Elephant Man. Perhaps even Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins. But what about Eli Bowen, the legless acrobat? Or Prince Randian, the human torso? These were just a few of the many stars that shone during the heyday of the American sideshow, from 1840 to 1950. American Sideshow chronicles the lives of truly amazing performers, examining these brave and extraordinary curiosities not just as sideshow performers but as people, delving into the lives they led and the ways they were able to triumph over and even benefit from their abnormalities. American Sideshow discusses the rise and fall of the original sideshows and their subsequent replacement by today's self-made freaks. With the progress of modern medicine, technological advancements, and the wonderful world of body modification, abnormalities are being overcome, treated and even prevented: Siamese twins can now be separated, and in addition to this, tongues can be forked, horns surgically implanted, and earlobes removed. There are also, of course, modern-day giants, fire eaters, sword swallowers, glass eaters, human blockheads, and oh, so much more. These fascinating personalities are celebrated through intimate biographies paired with stunning photographs. Approximately two hundred performers from the past one hundred and sixty years are featured, giving readers a comprehensive and sometimes astonishing look into the history of the American sideshow.
Price: $6.99
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Secrets of the Sideshows (None)
On small-town ballfields and county fairgrounds, the sideshow performers set up their tents and trailers in the shadow of the Ferris wheel. There they amazed us with daring feats such as fire eating and sword swallowing, intrigued us with exhibitions of human oddities and various "anatomical wonders," and yes, deceived us with illusions such as "Atasha the Gorilla Girl" and even outright fakes. These bizarre spectacles engaged the mind as well as the eye. Was the human blockhead act, in which the performer pounded a large nail or ice pick into his nostril, real or fake? Was the so-called alligator boy genuine or a "gaffed" oddity, painted with glue to produce a scaly simulation of reptilian skin? While the sideshows have now all but vanished from the American landscape, they leave a fascinating legacy of romance and mystery. Many of their secrets remain, only grudgingly given up, if at all, by aging showmen and "bally talkers." Joe Nickell--once a carnival pitchman, then a magician, a private detective, and an investigative writer--has pursued sideshow secrets for years. He has interviewed the showmen and performers, collected carnival memorabilia, researched the published literature, and even performed some classic sideshow feats, such as eating fire and lying on a bed of nails while a cinderblock was broken on his chest. Secrets of the Sideshows reveals the specific methods and tricks behind the performances, the showmen's tactics for recruiting performers and attracting crowds, and more. Nickell also examines the behind-the-scenes secrets of sideshow life, including details of the remarkable personal lives of those men and women billed as "freaks.".
Price: $13.55
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Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency. Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture. Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice. "Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."— Virginia Quarterly Review.
Price: $12.23
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Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus
Everyone loves a carnival, whether it's the Big Top or a traveling midway kicking up dust. These roving extravaganzas are as amusing as they are mysterious and as innocent as they are sordid. Step Right Up is a one-of-a-kind anthology that collects the finest literature and the most absorbing first-person accounts about carnivals, sideshows, and the circus, capturing all of the spectacle and sensation of this unusual and treasured tradition. A colorful assortment of characters populate the fairgrounds and circus tents of this unique collection from circus legends like P. T. Barnum and Otis Jordan the Frog Prince to a motley crew of ride monkeys and rubes. Step Right Up takes the reader everywhere from a small village in Romania to the streets of Coney Island and offers everything from Fred Rosen's account of the scandalous demise of Grady "Lobster Boy" Stiles Jr. to imaginative fiction like Michael Chabon's macabre take on the origin of clowns. The bizarre romance and mystery of the world's oldest and oddest traveling institution come to life in selections from Katherine Dunn, Kevin Baker, Jim Tully, Flannery O'Connor, Lee Durkee, Robert Hough, Michael Chabon, Fred Rosen, Susan Dickinson, Joseph Michell, Edora Welty, and Ellen Hunnicut..
Price: $5.81
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Cirkus: A Novel
In Patti Frazee's astonishing debut novel, enchantment and illusion casually commingle with reality as the Borefsky Brothers Circus makes its way across the American Midwest in the summer of 1900. Mariana, the fortune teller, makes herself invisible and drifts through the nighttime circus, listening in on conversations and watching over her beloved Shanghai, a fire-breathing dwarf who closely guards his secrets, even from Mariana's second sight. Conjoined twins Atasha and Anna cling to each other and weep for their home and for their mother and father who sold them to the circus. Jakub, the circus manager and husband to Mariana, fears his wife's gifts, grieves his own failures, and drinks to forget it all. The stories and closely guarded histories of the troupe of performers dance around each other until a love affair between Shanghai and Atasha destroys the delicate balance. As secrets are revealed and old wounds are opened, the consequences are unbearable to some and liberating to others. Lyrically graceful and populated by vividly drawn characters, Cirkus is a haunting novel of devastating heartbreak and exquisite loveliness. "For everyone who has ever dreamed about juggling fire, spinning in space, or falling in love with the girl on the flying trapeze."-Judith Katz, author of The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound "The freaks' of Cirkus are fully realized, poignantly drawn fictional characters. Conjoined twins Atasha and Anna, in particular, are so intimately portrayed that Frazee herself strikes me as a conjurer, a channeler of separate human experience."-Alison McGhee, Author of Rainlight, Shadow Baby, and Was it Beautiful? "A feast of words and dreams.Frazee's women are passionate spirits as vivid as those in the best fairytales, and still are real-their experiences a raw truth."-Susan Power, author of Roofwalker and The Grass Dancer Patti Frazee teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. A native of Nebraska, she received her BFA in theater from the University of Nebraska/Kearney and her MFA in writing from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received an honorable mention for the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice 2005 Emerging Lesbian Writer's Fund. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. .
Price: $9.95
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Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body
"The release of Freakery is as much a comment on modern academia as it is an intriguing exploration of the enduring fascination with the construction and presentation of those "who have been coarsely categorized as 'freaks,' 'curiosities', prodigies' and 'monstrosities.'"—Ethnologies Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakeryis a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture. .
Price: $23.40
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James Taylor's Shocked and Amazed: On & Off the Midway
As the world's only publication devoted to sideshow, James Taylor's Shocked and Amazed! On & Off the Midway is chock-full of carnival and circus midway madness and mayhem. Hear the truth behind this uniquely American art form from the lips of the human marvels themselves! Shocked and Amazed! invites you to explore and satisfy your curiosity for the strange, the weird, the bizarre, the odd and the unusual. Witness never-before-seen photographs from the personal collections of sideshow superstars from yesteryear! Marvel at the sideshow stories presented personally for your pleasure by sideshow performers! Thrill to these titillating tales of laughter and woe on the sawdust trail from the likes of: Frank Lentini, who could kick a football the length of the midway with his third leg; Melvin Burkhart, the Human Blockhead who could pound six-inch spikes into his head; Harold Huge, the sideshow fat man who needs "Six Gals to Hug Him, and a Boxcar to Lug Him"; Percilla the Monkey Girl and her husband, Emmitt the Alligator Skin Man; Bill Durks, the Man with Three Eyes and many, many more. (7 x 10, 288 pages, b&w photos).
Price: $5.72
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