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.

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.

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.

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.

Download or read book Freakshow written by Jon Dovey and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2000 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps – in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at ‘reality TV’ in an attempt to understand the mass media’s fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror. *BR**BR*Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday? *BR**BR*In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras – and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting.

Download or read book The Freakshow written by Bryan Smith and published by Leisure Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow has rolled into Pleasant Hills, Tennessee, and the quiet little town will never be the same. In fact, much of the town won't survive as unimaginable creatures lure locals to a fate worse than death. Original.

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.

Download or read book Freakshow written by Jacquin Sanders and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Wonders written by John Woolf and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of the Victorian freak show and circus, and the remarkable cast of characters who performed in them.

Download or read book Freak Show written by Bruce Jones and published by . This book was released on 2006-05-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humble man, lonely at heart, seeks out the rejected "Freaks" of the world, taking these misbegotten outcasts under his wing in a traveling show of oddities. But life is not without its own irony and his true self is revealed in a twist of fate and revenge.

Download or read book Freak Show written by Carl Hammer and published by Chronicle Books (CA). This book was released on 1996 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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.

Download or read book The Victorian Freak Show written by Lillian Craton and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Freak Show written by Kyle Baker and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book Undead Ed and the Demon Freakshow written by Rotterly Ghoulstone and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being a zombie is no picnic, especially when your body is rotting right before your eyes. (Gross!) As if Ed Bagley didn't already have it bad enough, he's now being chased by a horde of demons sent by Kambo Cheapteeth, an undead circus clown who’s always angry. With the help of his werewolf buddy, Max Moon, Ed ventures into the ultimate vortex of evil: a demon circus, to battle with Kambo once and for all! Along the way, he encounters an evil curse, a maze of mirrors, a giant spewing sewer creature, and a floating girl with a sewn-up eye who’s determined to destroy him. Can Ed hold it together (and keep from decomposing) long enough to stop the big top?

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.

Download or read book Call of Water written by Marina Simcoe and published by Madame Tan's Freakshow. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man with a teasing smile and an angel's voice, Zeph is supposed to be nothing more than a beautiful, fun Parisian adventure. His voice lures me in. His gorgeous blue eyes draw me to him. And his smile puts me at ease. We part after just one night. The next time I see him, I'm captured and trapped in a world I never knew existed. Madame Tan's establishment is intriguing and whimsical on the outside. But it turns dark and sinister as I'm plunged deep into it. Humans do not belong in the menagerie, so what is Zeph doing here? I realize I know nothing about the man who has ruled over my imagination since the day we met. I need to find my way out or risk spending the rest of my life locked in a cage. Only the more I learn about Zeph, the more I realize he's not from my world. Is he a willing participant in the menagerie? Or a victim, just like me? _____________________________________ Each book in the Madame Tan's Freakshow series is a complete love story of a separate couple. To follow the main storyline, however, it is recommended to read the trilogy in order. A part of this story, with a different world explanation, has been previously published as Menagerie of Oddities in Tempted by Fae anthology. Call of Water is a contemporary fantasy romance that contains graphic descriptions of intimacy and some violence ( not by the hero against the heroine.) Intended for mature readers. ____________________________ Books set in the world of the River of Mists: Serpent's Touch Book 1 - Serpent's Touch Book 2 - Serpent's Claim Madame Tan's Freakshow Book 1 - Call of Water Book 2 - Madness of the Moon Book 3 - Power of Rage