Thursday, July 16, 2009

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH


WATER FOR ELEPHANTS
Sarah Gruen
paperback, 2007
$13.95

How did I miss this book?!

A terrific, colourful, engrossing page-turner about life and love in a depression-era travelling circus that came highly recommended a few weeks ago from a visitor to the bookstore. A very BIG thank you, whoever you are...

Told in flashback by 90-year-old Jacob Jankowski, who upon the death of his parents drops out of veterinary school and winds up in the employ of The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, tending to their menagerie of exotic animals and falling in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for.




Photographs courtesy of our partner Todd/Browning Gallery.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

SKIN AND BONES



DISSECTION
Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
John H. Warner & James M. Edmonson
hardcover, 2009
50.00


A startling window into the education of American doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- on both a visceral level and for its revealing cultural record. Two hundred pages filled with cringe-worthy shots of medical students -- barehanded gentlemen and a few ladies in street clothes showing off their scalpels, saws and textbooks -- while their cadavers, mostly poor and black, are awkwardly posed, and exposed.