Rating: 
Summary: Finally, a Voice for the Masses!
Review: Author Lily Burana dazzles with her book Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America. She tells of becoming engaged, then feeling that she still has unresolved issues with her former occupation as exotic dancer. To delve into these issues one last time and attempt to gain a sense of closure, she spends a year travelling the country at the top of her game.
Burana has a style of writing that is at once brutally honest and achingly delicate. She can describe a filthy hotel room in revealing detail and also lay bare her soul in all its conflicted layers of exhilaration, weariness, and intellect.
The plot is developed in such a way that the journey does not become one endless trek in a g-string, with each club blurring into the next. To avoid this, Burana inserts flashbacks of her former work as a stripper. These flashbacks serve not only to pace the plot of the book but also to give the reader more insight as to what such an intelligent, progressive woman was ever doing in such a career. Burana presents herself honestly at all her personal highs and lows, yet still manages to be humble and real rather than indignant and defensive.
From cover to cover, Strip City is an extremely well-written and engaging chronicle. Burana tells a story of a world that most people know little of, but she does it honestly, exposing the bad right along with the good. This book is the touching story of one woman coming to terms with herself. And as for the book's authenticity and honesty when dealing with the industry of stripping, I suppose only a stripper herself could judge that. And I just have.
Rating:
Summary: An honest, funny look at a fascinating world
Review: After becoming engaged to a charming cowboy in Wyoming, New York and San Francisco-based writer and stripper Lily Burana decides to take a last tour of the strip clubs in America, in order to decide what stripping has meant to her. Burana packs her bags (even her inventory of necessaries is fascinating) and heads out into America.
With emotional honesty, a journalistic eye on her own life, and a great deal of humor, Burana narrates the story of her journey while she looks back at the generations of strippers and burlesque queens who preceded her, and at the same time evaluates the years she spent dancing in clubs in New York and San Francisco. Included in her narrative are starkly moving tales of the rebellious teenager she was, the activist she became, and the woman and writer she is.
Burana also describes the world and business of strip clubs with an experienced eye, and allows us to meet the dancers, managers, employees, and club owners. Burana gives us a fascinating look at the backstage world of stripping that is usually hidden from view.
Strip City combines history, expose, and memoir in such a way that the interweaving tales of Burana's past and present, and the story of her trade, make not only a moving and informative story, but an engaging one.
Rating:
Summary: Stripping From The Inside
Review: Lily has written an insightful book; she's "been there and done that". A must-read for anyone interested in the answers to "How can they do that?" and "Why do they do that?". If you've been a lady on-stage (or thought about it) or a gentleman in the audience, run and buy this book. It's not a glorification, but she tells it like it is.
Rating:
Summary: STARK NAKED
Review: From the picture in the back of the book, you know that Lily Burana is a babe. She has dimples and twinkly eyes that belie her buxom stripper body. She looks almost strange in her leopard-print halter dress except you know men dig that Britney Spears "I'm-Not-a-Girl, Not-Yet-a-Woman" stuff. But all that aside, what is really something else about Burana is that she is a smart, talented woman and her talents go beyond shimmying down the pole gracefully (without making that awaful SWEEEEEEEEE sound with your thighs). Lily is intelligent, her prose draws you in and you instantly become part of her world, even if you've never set foot inside a strip joint in your life (and don't know a thong from a t-back).
I was pleased that Lily showed she is not just some bimbo. Many people--and perhaps plenty of readers--will come in with that prejudice, but it just isn't fair. I'll admit when I hear about the rockers I grew up listening to (who made the music Lily Burana, in her stage alter ego of Barbie Faust likes to strip to)have married some Playmate, I immediately think she must be a ditz and not someone who can perhaps PEN something for the magazine, rather than grace its pages.
I think Lily is intersting as a person, and not in a perverse "Oh-my-goodness-she-takes-her-clothes-off-for-money!" way. She grew up a goth/punk rocker, had the angst and the hip factor and took that to the stage with her.
The story of her fiance, a Wyoming fella, is sweet.
But more important is the stark picture of the sex industry, which Burana doesn't set out to present as stark but there's no way around it. Women baring it all for a few bucks ontstage is schoking. Men going to the clubs, then dissing the dancers, is sad. Especially striking are the women at the third-rate clubs who are probably better off, according to Burana, working at McDonald's. I knew a woman who stripped to care for a daughter with Downe Syndrome and she endured the humiliation of being considered "old" when in fact she was only about 30. She hardly made money onstage and the lap dances (where the real money is at) were few and far between.
Lily does a wonderful job of taking us into this world without passing judgment on the women, who will have to learn for themselves if it worth it.
Rating:
Summary: It's a memoir... not a how-to!
Review: First things first, Lily Burana is an exceptionally talented writer. Her memoir of her past (and occasional present) life as a topless dancer is witty, poignant and fascinating throughout. Detailing a personal odyssey that moves from a Times Square peep show to the yuppified "gentlemen's clubs" of today, along with intermittent stops in Wyoming, Lily bares more of her soul than her body. She understands why women perform in clubs. She understands why men spend their money in clubs. And she sees that economic interraction for what it's worth; the good, the bad and the tacky.It's a wonderful read! But if your goal is cheap arousal, or getting the "inside story" on strip clubs, don't bother. You're not going to learn any secret signs or code words that can lead to a date with your favorite stripper. If you're a woman that wonders about a life on this particular stage (or lap), you probably stand an equal chance of being encouraged or dissuaded by Lily's experiences. But if you want to be entertained by a writer with the ability to phrase her observations and experience into an enjoyable format, this one of the better choices you can make.
Rating: 
Summary: recovering stripper death therapy!
Review: Strip City is a highly recommended book for anyone whose been on the analytical side of strip club stripping or would like to be. It's great for those of us who have danced around wearing a slingshot and even for those who haven't. I commend her on making such a comprehensive presentation on a complex issue, she covers everything from feminism to illegal stage fees to the history of burlesque! I have been everywhere Lily has been and it was great to read about it! I was reading it on the plane coming home from Miami where I had an "unsuccessful" attempt to take up this romantic notion of farewell stripclub touring. It was great therapy for me. Words to let me know that you are not alone, and that this job is anything but easy. This book is clearly written from a heterosexual white woman's perspective but it is broad based enough so everyone who has stripped reads it and laughs and cries. The first scene begins in a tanning booth and I almost threw it in the garbage at that point, but gave it a benefit of the doubt and was grateful that I did!
Rating:
Summary: Stripping From The Inside
Review: Lily has written an insightful book; she's "been there and done that". A must-read for anyone interested in the answers to "How can they do that?" and "Why do they do that?". If you've been a lady on-stage (or thought about it) or a gentleman in the audience, run and buy this book. It's not a glorification, but she tells it like it is.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, Honest, and Eye Opening
Review: Burana loves to write and dance. She is fascinating woman who might have benefitted from a bit of therapy. Instead, she wrote this book. She tells a tale of dancers, but more a tale of her search for herself. She falls in love with a missing tooth cowboy and decides to strip across america. She is disarmingly honest and sensitive. She knows she works in an industry that is not perfect, honest, or warm. She tells it as she sees it. Her book is part memoir, part oral history,part expose, and a journey home. My only complaint is that she spent too much using her thesaurus in an attempt to prove she is smart. We know she is. Her writing is terrific, fresh, and her honesty is illuminating.
Rating: 
Summary: Not at all impresses
Review: I think this was a writers attempt to find something to get herself published. I was not impressed with her thoughts and thought she is something of an egomaniac. She got pissed when people dissed the profession, but had her own attitudes about what was right and wrong with the profession. I read this book as background research for a paper I was writing. From other readings and interviews with other performers, I think she is way off base and had her personal agenda in writing this book, and it was not to give us insight into the true live of an exotic dancer.
Rating:
Summary: Burana bares body , soul in engrossing, self-absorbed memoir
Review: Peripatetic and restless Lily Burana has a problem. After having discovered love and a desire to establish a life with her intended, she cannot abide removing herself from her past experiences as a stripper. This strangely narcissistic, provocative and demeaning profession has grafted itself on her identity. Burana needs, one last time, to relive her past life, to understand what motivated her to become a stripper and to place exotic dance into perspective. This one "last hurrah" becomes grist for her enticing, complex and satisfying memoir, "Strip City." Full of detail (in some cases, too much detail) and strengthened by the author's willingness to cut herself no slack in her quest for authentic understanding, "Strip City" explores and exposes a way of life which arouses admiration, condemnation and ambivalence. Ultimately, Burana offers no pat answers as to her core motivations in the selection of stripping as a profession. Driven by alienation as a teenager and subsequent economic necessity, she reluctantly invents herself as a performer and risks her identity on satisfying others' fantasties. Her candid admission that she really doesn't know why she persisted in a stripper's life (given her obvious talent as a writer) is frustrating to the reader, especially after traveling with her through a year-long national farewell tour of strip joints. However, to her credit, Burana's odyssey is neither self-congratulatory or exculpatory. Her courage to face her own life and her steadfast commitment to discover her true internal compass bestow a sense of grace and honesty to her writing. Part autobiography, part social history, part contemplative rumination, "Strip City" explores a "business of many hungers." Burana acknowledges that stripping can be inhumane and dehumanizing, to both participants and observers, but at the same time exhilarating and liberating. Containing the "volatile elements of sex, money and power," stripping confirms and belies stereotypes. Just as one feels comfortable with conclusions about the women who bare themselves for money and the customers who get off (or get bored) by women performers, Burana presents a personal anecdote, a historical reference or a colleague whose life blasts conventional wisdom to bits. At its best, "Strip City" breathes fresh air into our national debate about sexuality, sexual expression and women's bodies. At its worst, the memoir is repetitive and borders on obsessive in its details about exotic dance. Yet, it is an important work. Full of behind-the-scene observations and candid self-criticism, "Strip City" not only describes a robust life, it illuminates the darker corners of unfulfilled needs and unanswered existential questions.
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