American Freak Show

Author : Willie Geist
Publisher : Hachette Books
ISBN 13 : 1401304222
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Freak Show written by Willie Geist and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 022622743X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freak Show written by Robert Bogdan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Jessica L. Williams
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 331966462X
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show written by Jessica L. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-04 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Rachel Adams
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226005399
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sideshow U.S.A. written by Rachel Adams and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : M. Chemers
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 023061681X
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Stigma written by M. Chemers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Steve Niles
Publisher : IDW Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781600102554
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Freakshow written by Steve Niles and published by IDW Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 9780814782224
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freakery written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-10 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
ISBN 13 : 9780142412312
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freak Show written by James St. James and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Beth Macy
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316337560
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Truevine written by Beth Macy and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Valerie Bandura
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781937854386
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freak Show written by Valerie Bandura and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.