Freak Show

Freak Show PDF

Author: Robert Bogdan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-12-10

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 022622743X

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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.

American Freak Show

American Freak Show PDF

Author: Willie Geist

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1401304222

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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.

Freak Show

Freak Show PDF

Author: Valerie Bandura

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781937854386

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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.

Freak Show

Freak Show PDF

Author: James St. James

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-10-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780142412312

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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.

Freakshow

Freakshow PDF

Author: Jacquin Sanders

Publisher:

Published: 2024-01-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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FREAKSHOW Bat Fidler has always been a loner, never able to fit in with other people. Then he lands a wrestling job at a carnival sideshow. That's where he meets Emmy, a scrappy stripper, and Fish Boy, the belligerent guy in charge-and his lovely wife, Fish Girl, one of the stars of the freakshow. Bat as usual finds himself the misfit among the other performers. They all annoy him. He even finds himself arguing with Emmy. It's not long before Bat realizes that, in spite of her deformity, it's Fish Girl he wants. And that's when his life at the carnival turns to violence, and all their lives are changed.

The Freakshow

The Freakshow PDF

Author: Bryan Smith

Publisher: Grindhouse Press

Published: 2019-06-23

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781941918494

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The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow has come to the quiet town of Pleasant Hills, Tennessee. But this is no ordinary sideshow and these are not the usual "freaks" on display. As the unsuspecting townsfolk gather for an evening of strange spectacle, the slaughter is set to begin . . .

The Wonders

The Wonders PDF

Author: John Woolf

Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

Published: 2019-05-02

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1789290368

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The untold story of the Victorian freak show and circus, and the remarkable cast of characters who performed in them.

Freak Show

Freak Show PDF

Author: Carl Hammer

Publisher: Chronicle Books (CA)

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13:

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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.

Sideshow U.S.A.

Sideshow U.S.A. PDF

Author: Rachel Adams

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2001-12

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0226005399

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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.

Freak Show

Freak Show PDF

Author: Kyle Baker

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781878574329

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"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.