The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (Hardcover)

by Susan Orlean (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Orchid Thief, has always been drawn to the extraordinary in the ordinary, so when her Esquire editor asked her to profile the child actor Macaulay Culkin using the title "The American Man at Age Ten," she insisted instead on writing about a "typical" kid. The result--one of the 20 profiles drawn from magazines such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone for this collection--is a vivid window into the life of an ordinary and endearing boy from New Jersey who grapples with girls, environmental destruction, and the magical childhood landscape "that erodes from memory a little bit every day." Orlean has two tricks up her sleeve that make her profiles irresistible. First, she's got a mean hook. Take this lead: "Of all the guys who are standing around bus shelters in Manhattan dressed in nothing but their underpants, Marky Mark is undeniably the most polite." Second, she has an uncanny way of drawing her subjects. Bill Blass "is a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp," while a boxer (the dog kind) wears "the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor."

Orlean is a New Yorker herself, and most of her subjects hail from the Big Apple, including such unique personas as a real estate broker who can describe the inside of almost any apartment in the city ("Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience"); Nat, the new tailor at Manhattan Valet; her hairdresser; the city's most popular clown; an Ashanti king who drives a taxi; and the owner of the only buttons-only store in America. The author is keenly observant and always tries to walk in her subject's shoes, even when it's a show dog ("If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale"). When she does tackle the rich and famous, she uses these same talents to create portraits so intimate and zesty they're unlike any other. Orlean writes that her only justification for choosing a story is that she cares about it, and it shows. Her fondness for her subjects rubs off as she draws us into the tight and exquisite focus of their mundane and fascinating lives. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly
One of the New Yorker's most distinctive stylists, Orlean (The Orchid Thief) has a knack for capturing "something extraordinary in [the] ordinariness" of her subjects. Most are completely unknown, or were before she wrote about them in these 20 essays and profiles. Sure, there's a piece on designer Bill Blass and another on figure skater Tanya Harding, but Orlean clearly prefers to write about lesser known people like Felipe Lopez, New York's first Dominican high school basketball phenom, or Kwabena Oppong, a New York taxicab driver who also happens to be the king of the Ashanti living in the United States. (He attends to his Ghanaian subjectsDsettling disputes, presiding over ceremoniesDaround his cab-driving schedule.) Disarming but disciplined, Orlean's style is unobtrusively first person, with deft leads: "If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale," she writes, opening a story on a prize show dog. While some stories obviously evolve from her lifeDa profile of a smalltown news reporter who inevitably knows everyone, a hairdresser who is a "perfect master of ceremonies"Din others, she ventures far afield: the cult-fave 1960s sister rock band, the Shaggs; teenage Hawaiian surfer girls with offhand fearlessness; a female Spanish matador. (Jan. 26) Forecast: Collections are rarely easy sells, but most of these pieces are gems, and Orleans has become such a staple of the New Yorker that her name together with the stylish jacket image of a woman in bullfighting garb may be a red cape for the magazine's many subscribers. 8-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House (January 23, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679462988
• ISBN-13: 978-0679462989
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,398,602 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoroughly entertaining, fun and inspiring book, January 28, 2001

By	AvidReader (New York) - See all my reviews

After reading Susan Orlean's excellent The Orchid Thief last year and having followed some of her recent writing in The New Yorker (particularly a fantastic piece on the hapless New Hampshire girl-rock group from the 1970's, The Shaggs), I was eagerly awaiting this collection of profiles. It not only surpassed my very high expectations for literary quality, it is one of the funniest and most entertaining, lively and moving books I have read in quite awhile. She gets these people down perfectly and is a master of the revealing touch. The opening chapter on a typical 10-year-old American boy is my favorite -- it allows the reader to enter a kid's world very much from his point of view while overlaying a beautifully reported and crafted commentary that manages all at once to be empathetic, witty,ironic and highly informative. The ending of this piece, like the ending to both the introduction and the title piece on the first female matador in Spain which concludes the book, is hauntingly poignant and gets to what Orlean is really about here: showing the extraordinarily captivating nature of what seemingly ordinary people are really like when closely examined in their own subcultures. The intelligence and insight she brings to bear in joyfully sharing with the reader what she has discovered is what makes this book so wonderful.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book., February 6, 2001

By A Customer

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.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What Happened to Our Susan Orlean?, February 1, 2001

By A Customer

Before Susan Orlean became self-obsessed, she was a journalist who was posed to inherit the literary tradition of Didion, McPhee, Capote, Wolfe, etc. But something's happened. With the fluke popularity of the Orhard Thief--a very uneven book, one of those extended New Yorker articles that shuld have been left as is because it now reads as merely a struggle to fill up space--she's turned herself into a New York, high powered, high profile "celebrity" writer who seems to have lost touch with the small, quiet reporter who was fascinated first and foremost with her subjects...not herself. This book is a disappointment. How telling of her new attitude toward her subjects that on the cover of a book about OTHER people ("Encounters with Extraordinary People") she's posed seductively and made-up to the hilt. This is a shame of a book. I once adored this writer's older work.