American Freak Show

Author : Willie Geist
Publisher : Hachette Books
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2011-08-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781401304225

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American Freak Show by Willie Geist Pdf

This is not the first book written about quantum mechanics, but it just might be the last. The theory presented inside these pages is so revolutionary that it has stunned the scientific community into reconsidering centuries of thought about the behavior of energy and matter. Prepare to have your mind blown. Sorry, that's the introduction to Willie Geist's next book--the culmination of his life's work. Look for it next spring, just in time for Mother's Day. This book is about his other passion: freaks. When he's not in the lab, Geist spends his time on MSNBC's Morning Joe sifting through the wreckage of American politics and popular culture. These days, that's a big job. With an Alaska hockey mom turning, almost overnight, into a national icon and threatening to move from Wasilla to the White House, with the world's most famous athlete now associated less with the Masters and more with the strippers, and with reality TV working around the clock to ensure the constitutional right of every man, woman, and child to fifteen minutes of fame, Geist's business is thriving. In his hilarious first book, American Freak Show, Geist takes the smart, biting observation loved by his television audience to new satirical extremes. The real-life characters who now haunt our daily lives are cast as stars in completely made-up scenes that, frankly, are not all that far from reality. Geist treats us to the first look at President Sarah Palin's unconventional inaugural address, performed live on WWE's Monday Night Raw after her renegade victory in the 2012 election. We go inside the ballroom for a Dean Martin-style welcome roast of Bernie Madoff upon his arrival in Hell, with Pol Pot serving as sidesplitting roastmaster. Geist provides us with never-before-seen FBI wiretap transcripts of the more mundane, but equally profane, telephone conversations of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. And George W. Bush's batting-cage-and-waterslide-themed plans for a presidential library are laid out publicly for the first time. From Obama to Oprah, Afghanistan to Lohan, and Snooki to the Salahis, Willie Geist spares no one as our host of this wild American Freak Show. You'll laugh out loud while weeping for the future of America.

Author : Robert Bogdan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2014-12-10
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780226227436

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Freak Show by Robert Bogdan Pdf

This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.

Author : Rachel Adams
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2001-12
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780226005393

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Sideshow U.S.A. by Rachel Adams Pdf

A staple of American popular culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after World War II. This book reveals the image of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, horrific and amusing specimens.

Author : Jessica L. Williams
Publisher : Springer
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2017-10-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783319664620

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Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show by Jessica L. Williams Pdf

This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates, the freak show model into a “new American freak show.” It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC’s Push Girls (2012-2013), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freak show but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies.

Author : M. Chemers
Publisher : Springer
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780230616813

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Staging Stigma by M. Chemers Pdf

Staging Stigma is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

Author : Beth Macy
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2016-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780316337564

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Truevine by Beth Macy Pdf

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? TRUEVINE is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.

Author : Steve Niles
Publisher : IDW Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Family violence
ISBN : 1600102557

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American Freakshow by Steve Niles Pdf

American Freakshow tells the tale of the bizarre and cruel life of a carnival freak as he seeks redemption (maybe) and murder (definitely!) in a Florida trailer park.

Author : Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1996-10
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0814782221

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Freakery by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson Pdf

A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different 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. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Author : James St. James
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2008-10-02
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 0142412317

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Freak Show by James St. James Pdf

Soon to be a major motion picture with Bette Midler, Laverne Cox, Abigail Breslin, and Alex Lawther starring as Billy Bloom "Freak Show has it all. It's hilarious, sad, sexy, and glamorous—just the way life should be."--Perez Hilton "Gutsy, funny, over-the-top Billy Bloom is a profile in courage."--The Washington Post Meet Billy Bloom, new student at the ultra-white, ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy and drag queen extraordinaire. Actually, ?drag queen? does not begin to describe Billy and his fabulousness. Any way you slice it, Billy is not a typical seventeen-year-old, and the Bible Belles, Aberzombies, and Football Heroes at the academy have never seen anyone quite like him before. But thanks to the help and support of one good friend, Billy?s able to take a stand for outcasts and underdogs everywhere in his own outrageous, over-thetop, sad, funny, brilliant, and unique way.

Author : James Baldwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 1895
Category : Mythology, Greek
ISBN : HARVARD:HWXRQK

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Old Greek Stories by James Baldwin Pdf

Author : Valerie Bandura
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Families
ISBN : 1937854388

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Freak Show by Valerie Bandura Pdf

Valerie Bandura's clean, crafted, headlong-into-the-breach poems are scary in their intensity. They are full of the violence of history, and Europe, and family, and motherhood, and bodies, and fate. Reader, there is a little of hell in them, and a ferocious desire for truth, which is to say, their speaker is engaged is the brave, sometimes appalling struggle to turn into a human being. 'Freak Show' is a terrific book."-Tony Hoagland, author of 'What Narcissism Means to Me' Valerie Bandura received degrees from Columbia University and Warren Wilson College, where she served as the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow.

Author : Emily Nussbaum
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780525508960

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I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum Pdf

The big picture : how Buffy the vampire slayer turned me into a TV critic -- The long con ("The Sopranos") -- The great divide : Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan -- Difficult women ("Sex and the city") -- Cool story, bro ("True detective," "Top of the lake" and "The fall") -- Last girl in Larchmont : the legacy of Joan Rivers -- Girls girls girls : "Girls," "Vanderpump rules," "House of cards and Scandal," "The Amy Schumer show," "Transparent" -- Confessions of the human shield -- How jokes won the election -- In praise of sex and violence : "Hannibal," "Law et order : SVU," "Jessica Jones," -- "The jinx," "The Americans" -- The price is right : what advertising does to TV -- In living color : Kenya Barris' -- Breaking the box : "Jane the virgin," "The comeback," "The good wife," "The newsroom," "Adventure time," "The leftovers," "High maintenance." -- Riot girl : Jenji Kohan's hot provocations -- A disappointed fan is still a fan ("Lost") -- Mr. big : how Ryan Murphy became the most powerful man in television.

Author : Carl Hammer,Gideon Bosker
Publisher : Chronicle Books (CA)
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Art
ISBN : UOM:39015062422970

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Freak Show by Carl Hammer,Gideon Bosker Pdf

Step right up! The show's about to begin with this mesmerizing collection of outrageous banners from the heydey of traveling circus sideshows. From the turn of the century through the 1950s, circus sideshows boasted unbelievable "freaks of nature", incredible transformations and death-defying acts. For collectors and nostalgia buffs, Freak Show celebrates this unique American commercial folk art. 90 full-color photos.

Author : Kyle Baker,Residents,Richard Sala
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Abnormalities, Human
ISBN : 1878574329

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Freak Show by Kyle Baker,Residents,Richard Sala Pdf

"At the turn of the last century, a travelling freak show grinds to a halt. Things are changing. The anger of being stared at, trapped, caged, is at war with the comfort of knowing your place in the universe. But the growing defiance of the freaks is no act. Will the ex-dog-faced girl break her bonds from the show, collapsing the fragile bubble of sustaining interdependence? Can the jaded Ringmaster, a profoundly broken man, find redemption through his love for the Woman With No Arms and No Legs? In this poetic, gritty world, there may only be one way out."--Publisher's website.

Author : Harriet E.H. Earle
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2019-08-21
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781476636825

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Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in American Horror Story by Harriet E.H. Earle Pdf

The horror anthology TV show American Horror Story first aired on FX Horror in 2011 and has thus far spanned eight seasons. Addressing many areas of cultural concern, the show has tapped in to conversations about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and more. This volume with nine new essays and one reprinted one considers how this series engages with representations of gender, sexuality, queer identities and other LGBTQ issues. The contributors address myriad elements of American Horror Story, from the relationship between gender and nature to contemporary masculinities, offering a sustained analysis of a show that has proven to be central to contemporary genre television.