Angela The Upside-Down Girl: And Other Domestic Travels (The Concord Library) [Paperback]

Emily Hiestand (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1999 | Series: The Concord Library

A childhood shaped by her zestful aunt Nan Dean of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; a girlhood spent in Oak Ridge ("Atom City"), Tennessee; a journey north to a seedy seaside town where a stripper named Angela the Upside-Down Girl is her first neighbor—these are only some of the geographical and spiritual journeys in this dazzling, seriously funny guide to the art of being human.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The loose-linked remembrances Emily Hiestand packs into Angela the Upside-Down Girl reveal a tongue tucked firmly in cheek, an eye for social travesty, and a flair for wry, evocative description. Fresh from the American South with a carload of art-school friends, Hiestand alights in a down-at-the-heels seaside town near Boston, Massachusetts, where the houses boast fake rock siding that resembles "giant mixed nuts inexplicably plastered to the wall." The eponymous Angela is a stripper who peels off clothes whilst standing on her head and earnestly lectures others on the importance of being limber. Shuttling across time and latitude lines, Hiestand recalls growing up in Tennessee's "Atom City," where Manhattan Project physicists developed the bomb that razed Hiroshima and where geek chic ruled. She writes ruefully and wonderfully about trying to document the lives led by her grandmother's clan in the deeper South. Along with some memorable stories are hours of tape recording full of "hisses, things being bumped, sudden cries" and surprising turns of thought as Aunt Mary declares while "talking about a Kodak camera, 'We wore brassieres. Yes, we did.'" Although uneven, Hiestand's tales are often very engaging. --Francesca Coltrera --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Although she now lives with her husband in Cambridge, Mass., several of the engrossing memories in this collection of reprinted essays deal with the author's 1950's childhood in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The town was the largest storehouse of weapons-grade uranium, and her father was a lawyer for the Atomic Energy Commission. Hiestand (The Very Rich Hours) relates the unusual experience of growing up in "atom town," as well as her affinity for the eccentric rural Alabama relatives she and her brothers were taken to visit on long automobile trips in their parents' Chrysler. The title piece is an amusing description of how Hiestand first moved out of the South to a Boston coastal town and attended a performance given by her neighbor, Angela, who was a striptease artist in Boston's infamous "Combat Zone." Of particular interest is Hiestand's account of how she decided to become a white member of Union, a black church in Boston where she found good will and community. Hiestand's book is compelling for its calm.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; 1st edition (May 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807071293
• ISBN-13: 978-0807071298
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,666,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reviewers loving Angela...what a surprise!, July 21, 1998

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This review is from: ANGELA THE UPSIDE-DOWN CL (Concord Library) (Hardcover)

[An] enchanting new book of essays.... Many personal essayists today try to capture our interest by being confessional but run the risk of revealing, like clumsy strippers, what we'd really rather not see. Hiestand has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian, and produced a tour de force. "Oooouuuweee!" as her cousin Bill would say. What a good book this is. --Boston Sunday Globe Book Review

Angela the Upside-Down Girl is about how to live creatively, see life through an artist's eye. With a subversive sense of humor and a wicked ability to pierce convention, [Hiestand] takes us on her journey to discover a meaningful sense of place in a chaotic world. Her place turns out to be North Cambridge, which she describes with the freshness and originality of Joyce in Dublin...

Angela the Upside-Down Girl reveals Emily Hiestand's exceptional talents which include an artist's eye for color and form, a cu! ltural anthropologist's ability to get people to tell their stories, and a poet's facility to express what is felt but not seen. --Cambridge Chronicle

Rich, revealing, and often hilarious... This book travels between only two places...but it travels so deeply into each place, both their pasts and their presents, that you come away from it feeling enlightened and enticed, and ready to hop on the next train heading north or south. --Hope Magazine

...and I say, also, "What a good book this is!"

-Chuck Eisenhardt

5.0 out of 5 stars Both Transcendental and Funny, An Eloquent Witness, June 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: ANGELA THE UPSIDE-DOWN CL (Concord Library) (Hardcover)

Angela the Upside-Down Girl is a revelation. Emily Hiestand is one of Robert Frost's true poets, "one upon whom nothing is lost." As she trains an eye of the rarest perception on the world we thought we knew, we discover the heart of light within ordinary and not-so-ordinary things. I marvel at her scope: her Weltyesque Aunt Nan Dean; her eloquent witness to the power of faith and community at Union Baptist Church; her love affair with automotive neon, which manages (as Emerson never could) to be both transcendental and funny; and, of course, there's Angela, whose gravity-defying grace can be seen as a figure for the whole book. But perhaps most engaging of all is the voice of our guide--Hiestand herself--the unifying principle through the book's many travels, wise, witty, shimmering in its clarity, a wonderful companion.

5.0 out of 5 stars Both Transcendental and Funny, An Eloquent Witness, June 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: ANGELA THE UPSIDE-DOWN CL (Concord Library) (Hardcover)

Angela the Upside-Down Girl is a revelation. Emily Hiestand is one of Robert Frost's true poets, "one upon whom nothing is lost." As she trains an eye of the rarest perception on the world we thought we knew, we discover the heart of light within ordinary and not-so-ordinary things. I marvel at her scope: her Weltyesque Aunt Nan Dean; her eloquent witness to the power of faith and community at Union Baptist Church; her love affair with automotive neon, which manages (as Emerson never could) to be both transcendental and funny; and, of course, there's Angela, whose gravity-defying grace can be seen as a figure for the whole book. But perhaps most engaging of all is the voice of our guide--Hiestand herself--the unifying principle through the book's many travels, wise, witty, shimmering in its clarity, a wonderful companion.