About this item
Step right up! and buy a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earththe Big Top, containing death-defying stunts, dancing bears, roaring tigers, and trumpeting elephants. The circus has always been home to the dazzling and the exotic, the improbable and the impossiblea place of myth and romance, of reinvention, rebirth, second acts, and new identities. Asking why we long to soar on flying trapezes, ride bareback on spangled horses, and parade through the streets in costumes of glitter and gold, this captivating book illuminates the history of the circus and the claim it has on the imaginations of artists, writers, and people around the world. Traveling back to the circuss early days, Linda Simon takes us to eighteenth-century hippodromes in Great Britain and intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso became enchanted with aerialists and clowns.
About the Author
Linda Simon's books include biographies of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein's companion and famous cookbook author) , Thornton Wilder (playwright who wrote Our Town) , William James (founder of American psychology) , Margaret Beaufort (grandmother of Henry VIII) , and Coco Chanel. What do these men and women have in common? Defiance. Each of them fought against the life that they should have led to create their own bold path. That's why they made such fascinating subjects. In her biographies, Simon illuminates the struggles, challenges, self-doubts, and moments of pure luck that shaped their lives. She's now working on a history of the circus. After all, isn't running away to join the circus one way to defy the life other people have planned out for you?
