Beautifully illustrated and filled with rich historical detail and
colorful anecdotes, this is a vibrant history for all those who have
ever dreamed of running away to the circus, now in paperback.
"Step right up!" and buy a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth--the 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 impossible--a 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 circus's 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. She introduces us to P. T.
Barnum, James Bailey, and the enterprising Ringling Brothers and reveals
how they created the golden age of American circuses. Moving forward to
the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia and to New York City's Big Apple
Circus and the grand spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, she shows how the
circus has transformed in recent years. At the center of the story are
the people--trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and
animal trainers, contortionists and clowns--that created the
sensational, raucous, and sometimes titillating world of the circus.
