Download or read book The Circus Train written by Amita Parikh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Bestseller and #1 LibraryReads Pick Water for Elephants meets The Night Circus in this World War II debut about a magnificent travelling circus, a star-crossed romance, and one girl’s coming-of-age during the darkest of times. “A powerful reminder that to live is not just to survive, but to be seen and known for ourselves.” —Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale When all is lost, how do you find the courage to keep moving forward? 1938. Lena Papadopoulos has never quite found her place within the circus, even as the daughter of the extraordinary headlining illusionist, Theo. Brilliant and curious, Lena—who uses a wheelchair after a childhood bout with polio—yearns for the real-world magic of science and medicine, her mind stronger than the limitations placed on her by society. Then her unconventional life takes an exciting turn when she rescues Alexandre, an orphan with his own secrets and a mysterious past. As World War II escalates around them, their friendship blossoms into something deeper while Alexandre trains as the illusionist’s apprentice. But when Theo and Alexandre are arrested and made to perform in a town for Jews set up by the Nazis, Lena is separated from everything she knows. Forced to make her own way, Lena must confront her doubts and dare to believe in the impossible—herself.

Download or read book Entertaining Elephants written by Susan Nance and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the lives and labors of nineteenth-century circus elephants shaped the entertainment industry. Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species. Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather. Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.

Download or read book Elephants on the Edge written by G. A. Bradshaw and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “At times sad and at times heartwarming . . . Helps us to understand not only elephants, but all animals, including ourselves” (Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation). Drawing on accounts from India to Africa and California to Tennessee, and on research in neuroscience, psychology, and animal behavior, G. A. Bradshaw explores the minds, emotions, and lives of elephants. Wars, starvation, mass culls, poaching, and habitat loss have reduced elephant numbers from more than ten million to a few hundred thousand, leaving orphans bereft of the elders who would normally mentor them. As a consequence, traumatized elephants have become aggressive against people, other animals, and even one another; their behavior is comparable to that of humans who have experienced genocide, other types of violence, and social collapse. By exploring the elephant mind and experience in the wild and in captivity, Bradshaw bears witness to the breakdown of ancient elephant cultures. But, she reminds us, all is not lost. People are working to save elephants by rescuing orphaned infants and rehabilitating adult zoo and circus elephants, using the same principles psychologists apply in treating humans who have survived trauma. Bradshaw urges us to support these and other models of elephant recovery and to solve pressing social and environmental crises affecting all animals—humans included. “This book opens the door into the soul of the elephant. It will really make you think about our relationship with other animals.” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

Download or read book The Night Circus written by Erin Morgenstern and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.

Download or read book The Circus in Winter written by Cathy Day and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005-07-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a half century, a small Indiana town hosts a circus troupe during the off-seasons in linked stories “as graceful as any acrobat’s high-wire act” (San Francisco Chronicle). A Story Prize Finalist From 1884 to 1939, the Great Porter Circus made the unlikely choice to winter in an Indiana town called Lima, a place that feels as classic as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and as wondrous as a first trip to the Big Top. In Lima, an elephant can change the course of a man's life—or the manner of his death. Jennie Dixianna entices men with her dazzling Spin of Death and keeps them in line with secrets locked in a cedar box. The lonely wife of the show’s manager has each room of her house painted like a sideshow banner, indulging her desperate passion for a young painter. And a former clown seeks consolation from his loveless marriage in his post-circus job at Clown Alley Cleaners. In this collection of linked stories spanning decades, Cathy Day follows the circus people into their everyday lives and brings the greatest show on earth to the page. “[An] exquisite story collection.” —The Washington Post “Often funny, always graceful, and rich with a mix of historical and imaginative detail.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Sublimely imaginative and affecting.” —The Boston Globe

Download or read book Crossing Back written by Marianna De Marco Torgovnick and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of Crossing Ocean Parkway, a personal memoir about adjusting to loss through books, meditation, and the process of memory itself Marianna De Marco Torgovnick experienced the rupture of two of her life’s most intimate relations when her mother and brother died in close proximity. Mourning rocked her life, but it also led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Her resulting journey into the past imagines a viable future and raises questions acute for Italian Americans but pertinent to everyone, about the nature of memory and the meanings of home at a time, like ours, marked by cultural disruption and wartime. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain presents a personal perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal. A sequel to her award-winning and much-anthologized Crossing Ocean Parkway, Crossing Back is about close familial ties and personal loss, written after the death of her remaining birth family, who had always been there, and now were not. After their loss, she entered a spiritual and psychological state of “transcendental homelessness”: the feeling of being truly at home nowhere, of being spiritually adrift. In a grand act of symbolic reenactment, she found herself moving apartments repeatedly, not realizing she did so subconsciously to keep busy, to stave off grief. By reading and studying great books, she opened up to mourning, a process she constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. Over time, she discovered that a third death colored and prolonged her feelings of grief: her first child’s death in infancy, which, in the course of a happier lifetime, had never been adequately acknowledged. Her new losses led her finally to take stock of her son’s death too. Reading and meditating, followed by writing, became daily her healing rituals. A warm and intimate user’s guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the end-point being memory without pain, Crossing Back is a wide-ranging memoir about growing older and learning to ride the waves of change. Lively and conversational, Torgovnick is masterful at tracking the moment-to moment, day-to-day challenges of sudden or protracted grief and the ways in which the mind and the body seem to search for—and sometimes find—solutions.

Download or read book A Circus for Love written by Barbara Cartland and published by Barbara Cartland EBooks ltd. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fleeing her scheming stepmother and a forced marriage, beautiful young heiress Thelma Fernhurst stumbles across a magnificent house like the Fairy Palace of her dreams. More amazing still, in its grounds she finds a circus, complete with lions and tigers and a Big Top – and loses her heart to its dashing owner, the Earl of Merstone! But the runaway’s dream turns to a nightmare when Thelma discovers that the Earl has an evil, scheming relative of his own – and unless a trembling Thelma can save him from a ravenous tiger, the Circus of Love will turn to a Circus of Death!

Download or read book Topsy written by Michael Daly and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a nineteenth-century elephant caught between warring circuses and battling scientists, from the author of The Book of Mychal. In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted. Many historical forces conspired to bring her, Thomas Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book to tell this astonishing tale. At the turn of the century, circuses in America were at their apex with P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh competing in a War of the Elephants. Their quest for younger, bigger, or more “sacred” pachyderms brought Topsy to America. Fraudulently billed as the first native-born elephant, Topsy was immediately caught between the disputing circuses as well as the War of the Currents, in which Edison and George Westinghouse (and Nikola Tesla) battled over the superiority of alternating versus direct current. Rich in period Americana, and full of circus tidbits and larger than life characters, Topsy is a touching and entertaining read. “A rollicking pachydermal tale . . . A summer escape.” —The New York Times “A nineteenth-century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next.” —Tom Brokaw “I’ve always respected Michael Daly as a great New York writer . . . He humanizes and speaks for those animals who cannot speak. He touches the hearts of those of us who are not animal activists.” —James McBride “A skillfully told and admirably researched reminder of a time not as long ago as we’d like to think.” —The Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Love and Consequences written by Margaret B. Jones and published by Riverhead Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former child gang member who followed her foster brothers into the Bloods at the age of eight reveals her participation in drug activities and violence before finding the strength within herself to graduate college and break free.

Download or read book The Novel and the Menagerie written by Kurt Koenigsberger and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first comprehensive account of the relation of collections of imperial beasts to narrative practices in England, The Novel and the Menagerie explores an array of imaginative responses to the empire as a dominant, shaping factor in English daily life. Kurt Koenigsberger argues that domestic English novels and collections of zoological exotica (especially zoos, circuses, traveling menageries, and colonial and imperial exhibitions) share important aesthetic strategies and cultural logics: novels about English daily life and displays featuring collections of exotic animals both strive to relate Englishness to a larger empire conceived as an integrated whole." "Koenigsberger's investigations range from readings of novels by authors such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter to analyses of ballads, handbills, broadsides, and memoirs of showmen. Attending closely to the collective English practices of imagining and delineating the empire as a whole, The Novel and the Menagerie works at the juncture of literary criticism, colonial discourse studies, and cultural analysis to historicize the notion of totality in the theory and practice of the English novel. In exploring the shapes of the novel in England and of the English institutions that collected exotic animals, it offers fresh readings of familiar literary texts and opens up new ways of understanding the character of imperial Englishness across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Routledge Circus Studies Reader written by Peta Tait and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field’s key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance. The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field. Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus.

Download or read book The Freedom Circus written by Sue Smethurst and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A story of extraordinary bravery, resilience and love that needed to be told.' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz Written by award-winning author and journalist Sue Smethurst, whose husband is Mindla and Michael’s grandson, The Freedom Circus is an epic story of courage, hope, humanity, survival and, ultimately, love. When Sue Smethurst first sat down with her grandmother-in-law and asked how she survived the Holocaust, she was shooed away. By that time Mindla was in a Melbourne Jewish nursing home with other survivors, her body ageing but mind still razor sharp. ‘Why do you want to know?’ she’d ask. ‘My story is nothing special.’ As death began approaching Sue became a little more pushy. She knew Mindla’s life had to be recorded and they were running out of time. Each week she’d bring cake from her favourite shop in St Kilda, a bottle of the brightest nail polish she could find, a handful of old pictures and her tape recorder. They’d chat and paint Mindla’s nails, and with each ‘chat’ her story unfolded. It was beyond anything Sue could have imagined. The tale of how Mindla and her husband Michael Horowitz, a circus performer for the famous Staniewski Brothers, escaped from Poland with their young son and embarked on a terrifying journey through the USSR and Middle East to Africa and ultimately to safety in Australia, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Download or read book Love War and Circuses written by Eric Scigliano and published by Bloomsbury Pub Limited. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, humans have revered, adored and exploited elephants. This kaleidoscopic account uncovers the ways in which elephants have shaped history, art, religion and popular culture.

Download or read book Circus of Wonders written by Elizabeth Macneal and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 internationally bestselling author of the “lush, evocative Gothic” (The New York Times Book Review) The Doll Factory comes an atmospheric and spectacular novel about a woman transformed by the arrival of a Victorian circus of wonders—“as moving as it is deeply entertaining” (Daniel Mason, New York Times bestselling author). Step up, step up! In 1860s England, circus mania is sweeping the nation. Crowds jostle for a glimpse of the lion-tamers, the dazzling trapeze artists and, most thrilling of all, the so-called “human wonders.” When Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders pitches its tent in a poor coastal town, the life of one young girl changes forever. Sold to the ringmaster as a “leopard girl” because of the birthmarks that cover her body, Nell is utterly devastated. But as she grows close to the other performers, she finds herself enchanted by the glittering freedom of the circus, and by her own role as the Queen of the Moon and Stars. Before long, Nell’s fame spreads across the world—and with it, a chance for Jasper Jupiter to grow his own name and fortune. But what happens when her fame begins to eclipse his own, when even Jasper’s loyal brother Toby becomes captivated by Nell? No longer the quiet flower-picker, Nell knows her own place in the world, and she will fight for it. Circus of Wonders is a beautiful story about the “complex dance between exploitation and empowerment, and the question of what it really means to have control over your own life” (Naomi Ishiguro, author of Escape Routes).

Download or read book The Animal Game written by Daniel E. Bender and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spread of empires in the nineteenth century brought more than new territories and populations under Western sway. Animals were also swept up in the net of imperialism, as jungles and veldts became colonial ranches and plantations. A booming trade in animals turned many strange and dangerous species into prized commodities. Tigers from India, pythons from Malaya, and gorillas from the Congo found their way—sometimes by shady means—to the zoos of major U.S. cities, where they created a sensation. Zoos were among the most popular attractions in the United States for much of the twentieth century. Stoking the public’s fascination, savvy zookeepers, animal traders, and zoo directors regaled visitors with stories of the fierce behavior of these creatures in their native habitats, as well as daring tales of their capture. Yet as tropical animals became increasingly familiar to the American public, they became ever more rare in the wild. Tracing the history of U.S. zoos and the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied them, Daniel Bender examines how Americans learned to view faraway places and peoples through the lens of the exotic creatures on display. Over time, as the zoo’s mission shifted from offering entertainment to providing a refuge for endangered species, conservation parks replaced pens and cages. The Animal Game recounts Americans’ ongoing, often conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as anachronistic prisons by animal rights activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.

Download or read book Jumbos and Jumping Devils written by Nisha P.R. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jumbos and Jumping Devils is a pioneering exploration of the social history of circus in India over the last 150 years. It presents a wide variety of amazing tales ranging from the blooming and evolution of circus acrobatics in early twentieth-century Malabar to the sensational legal battles following the ban of wild animals and children from the circus ring in the twenty-first century. Alongside extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author has used memorabilia including photographs, notices, posters, letters, diaries, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, and recollections of the circus community to chronicle the hitherto untold story of the Indian circus. The book paves the way for a new sociocultural analysis of performance genres and popular culture in the subcontinent against several overlapping contexts. These include the remaking of caste and gender identities, transformation of physical cultures and bodies, interventions of the colonial and postcolonial states, and emergence of new transregional and transnational spaces.

Download or read book Wild and Dangerous Performances written by P. Tait and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement. This book analyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema, reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion that animals embody a phenomenology of emotions and feelings in culture.