The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup : My Encounters with Extraordinary People

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful examination of the human condition!
Review: Subtitled, "my encounters with extraordinary people", this book is a treasure trove of tales about some of the most interesting (and to a great extent ordinary) people you'll ever read about and most of them are people you'd never know. Susan Orlean is a regular writer for The New Yorker and is one of their very finest. Her last book, "The Orchid Thief" was at once captivating and bizarre. "The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup," is a compilation of a number of her pieces from the New Yorker in which she details the comings and goings of very ordinary every day people... and manages to make them all seem extraordinary. The best part of Orlean's writing is that she keeps the space intact between herself as the observer and chronicler of these lives and the individuality expressed in each of the life stories these people have. Although the expression goes, "Life is stranger than fiction," I would argue that Susan Orlean demonstrates that "Life is funnier than fiction", too! From the couple who breed show dogs to an "average" ten year old boy, to the female bullfighter (not usually a woman's sport) to the African king driving taxis in New York, everyone who is profiled in this book is in their own way funny, interesting, entertaining, and some, to a tiny extent sad. We meet pre-teen surfer girls and the middle-aged women who were once "The Shaggs". We read about the guy who invented "the Big Chair" (you know that chair in which people are photographed at county fairs?) and a sweet group of southern gospel singers. No one is too bizarre, too ordinary, or too unlikely. Orlean makes it clear that we are surrounded every day by extraordinariness - everyone has a story and many of them have great stories.  I loved this book for exposing the wonders of the human condition.

Rating:
Summary: a disappointment
Review: Such a great title. A couple of good articles, particularly about the surfers and the matador, and then nothing but lots of magazine filler kind of stories. A disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: A totally and completely amazing book
Review: Sure to be a best seller, this collection of previously published magazine articles is Orlean at her most radiant. In spite of the fact that I am not drawn to collections, I found this book so full of evocative, brilliant and insightful stories that I couldn't, simply wouldn't, put it down. Her writing is so descriptive, so visual and so appreciative of all those she profiles, it makes me question whether I actually see the world through the same lens. Perhaps now I will.

Rating:
Summary: avenues of rain
Review: Susan Orlean is a brilliant writer and tells non-fictional stories better than anyone since Joan Didion. Didion has a deeper language but Susan Orlean can make a character pop up and sit beside you on the front porch, with a jam jar of grape juice. My favorite story is about surfer girls in Maui. I used to surf and live on Oahu and Orlean captures da islands, surf culture, a surfer leaving the water, dog tired, at sunset, how older surfers relate to younger ones, haloes, pop culture, mass culture, boredom, economic realities, the akward grace of teenage girls--she does this and more in a magazine profile. A girl loses a surf contest and puts her blonde head in the crook of her arm and cries, and it is so compelling you want to jump in the story on the beach and give the girl a lovely mint. In a profile of Tanya Harding--that Existential Hero!--Orlean brings to life the great white trash of the great northwest, and writes about the Tanya look alikes skating at the ice rink at the mall--died blonde bangs, tight denim jeans, black eyeliner--so that I had a vision of all those girls not quite pretty enough, not quite thin enough, but who dream with sullen pouting passion and will send a fat guy to bash the skinny pretty girl on the knee. Yes! Susan Orlean! I came across her book Saturday Night almost ten years ago and still remember the metaphors and characters going about their business on Saturday nights, and the long 60 Minutes Sunday night to follow. Saturday Night is even a better book so dig it fool. I have to go now and hassle my cat.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging, if Also a Little Repetitive
Review: Susan Orlean is indeed one of the best magazine writers out there right now--one of the best catches of Tina Brown's from the Dark Ages of the New Yorker! And this book is definitely a must for anyone interested in the contemporary nonfiction world. However, by limiting the collection to merely profiles, Orlean has limited the reader's appreciation of her great talents. The books ends up repeating itself too much.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging, if Also a Little Repetitive
Review: Susan Orlean is indeed one of the best magazine writers out there right now--one of the best catches of Tina Brown's from the Dark Ages of the New Yorker! And this book is definitely a must for anyone interested in the contemporary nonfiction world. However, by limiting the collection to merely profiles, Orlean has limited the reader's appreciation of her great talents. The books ends up repeating itself too much.

Rating:
Summary: I loved this book.
Review: Susan Orlean writes with more grace, style and wit than anyone in the magazine world today. These well-reported, beautifully crafted profiles of both known and unknown characters show her at the top of her form. Orlean has a knack for being at the right place at the right time to capture a telling detail or quote and, contrary to the wrongheaded and ignorant comments in a few of the customer reviews here, she is, if anything, self-effacing and unobtrusive as she brings the reader deeply into the lives of her subjects. Literary journalism as an art form necessarily includes the author's voice and point of view -- these are what make it less artificial and far more interesting than standard "objective" reporting. The rave reviews for this book in the New York Times and other publications are well justified.

Rating:
Summary: The Dreaded Urge to Collect That Which Should Not Be
Review: Susan Orlean's magazine pieces (usually in The New Yorker) define a certain bright, glossy, mannered high standard in magazine entertainment. At best they're very fluent and well-reported, at worst they cloy and preen with a glib, narcissistic flatness that may not bug you too much until you try to read the piece a second time. (In this respect Orlean and Adam Gopnick are the Homecoming Queen and King of enamelled profundity in literary journalism.) She (or her editors) generally choose her subjects wisely, so novelty and variation disguise her remarkably narrow range. Will someone want to read this stuff in 10 or 20 years? I don't want to read them again now. Write that subscription renewal check for The New Yorker, but save the hardcover bucks for writing that isn't trapped in a self-enchanted hall of mirrors.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing to get excited about
Review: Susan Orlean, notable to most as a writer for The New Yorker, became the literary "It" girl in 2003 with the help of the movie "Adaptation" (the movie based on her book The Orchid Thief). In an attempt to capitalize on that book, "Bullfighter..." was released.

The book takes some of Orlean's favorite and most popular articles and complies them into what appears to be a theme about remmarkable people. Orlean speaks candidly in the begining of her book about always wanting to be a writer and ironicly this introduction proves to be some of the best writing in the book. The rest of the books tends to be pretty much hit and miss. A fasinating story about a taxi driver who is in reality an African king somehow ends up being not so fasinating. Another story about a 10 year old is down right boring. My favorite ended up being about a store owner in New York that only sells buttons.

This is not to say that Orlean is a bad writer, she's not: however she writes with a sometimes akward detachment that made it hard for me to enjoy these "personal" articles.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Recent Reviews Suggest
Review: The other reviews included here provide an excellent synopsis of the book's format and subject matter. I do not read a great deal of non-fiction (outside of newspapers and case law), but did enjoy these well-written glimpses into the lives of "real" people. What gave me pause, however, was the fact that a few of these glimpses seemed dated and were, consequently, not as interesting or relevant as they might have been had I read them when they were current. The Fab Five Freddie and Tiffany profiles seemed particularly passe. I especially enjoyed the piece about "The Shaggs." The essay prompted me to download some of thier music, and with this background the piece came alive. Even my fifteen year old son asked to read and enjoyed the profile after hearing one of the tracks. Overall,I take issue with reviewers who have called the book ho-hum. I read it straight through and was amazed anew by the many ways we stumble into or onto what becomes our calling.