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BARE

Name: BARE
Author: Elisabeth Eaves
ISBN: 0-375-41233-6

ON WOMEN, DANCING, SEX, AND POWER

by Elisabeth Eaves ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 2002

Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.

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Former Reuters journalist Eaves reflects on her years as an exotic dancer in Seattle, the path that led her there, and why she’ll never go back.

“I had a deep distaste for clothing as a child,” she tells us. Other than a fondness for nudity, however, Eaves seemed to exhibit few girlhood indicators for her eventual stage work, raised as she was by scholarly parents who emphasized the importance of intellectual achievement over all other. But it was this exclusive focus on the cerebral, the writer insists, that made her all the more determined to explore gender issues and sexuality, which began puzzling her as soon as she hit adolescence and was confronted with a seemingly arbitrary moral universe. Irritated by the rules required of nice girls, she became fascinated with what she perceived as the sexual freedom enjoyed by strippers. After graduating from college and moving in with her boyfriend in Seattle, she finally took the plunge and began dancing naked at the Lusty Lady. Twelve months passed and she gave it up, moved on, and got a graduate degree at Columbia; years later, however, she was driven to return to the exhibitionist profession to explore why, exactly, she’d done it in the first place. Her personal justifications for taking up dancing (pursuit of personal freedom and stereotype-busting) and giving it up (it was screwing with her behavior in relationships) are unremarkable. The strength of the work lies in her non-sensational, balanced look at her coworkers, with all of their singular histories, and at the backstage of a strip parlor, with the attendant headaches of workplace etiquette and labor relations.

Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.

Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2002

ISBN: 0-375-41233-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.