Margo Jefferson, the cultural critic for the New York Times who has frequently reviewed theatre for the paper, has put out an analytical study of entertainer Michael Jackson.

 

The 160-page volume, titled "On Michael Jackson," will be published by Pantheon on Jan. 10, 2006. It contains chapters will such titles as "Freaks," "Star Child," "Home" and "Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex." It concludes with a study of Jackson's recent trial for child molestation.

 

Jefferson put in six months as the Times second-string theatre critic in late 2003 and early 2004. Prior to that, she was the paper’s Sunday theatre columnist for a while. She is also the author of a short performance piece titled 50 Minutes With Harriet and Phillis, which ran at Off Broadway's Cherry Lane Alternative space in 2001.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/97089.html

 

Michael Jackson speaks to and for the monstrous child in us all."

 

So goes the summation by Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson in her new, relatively short but effective treatise about the pop star. This slim volume titled On Michael Jackson comes from Pantheon and runs 138 pages.

 

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Jefferson, in quick, cut-to-the-bone strokes, examines Michael's bizarre, brutal working childhood and adolescence, and how that formed and deformed his own and the public's image of him. Nobody comes off well, certainly not Michael's parents, Joe the brutal taskmaster and Katharine the religious "pacifier."

 

Jefferson, an African-American and an admirer of Jackson's work - certainly the first 10 years - pinpoints many essential career moments, the fabulous original style, his slow, then warp-speed transformations, his hubris, childishness, arrogance and bewilderment - all of which led to his child molestation trial this year. He was acquitted but the cost was everything that meant anything: his career and his reputation.

 

Jefferson also bravely writes of the reality of some children - that at ages 12, 13, 14, 15 they are not necessarily "innocent." They are curious. She writes: "They have sexual desires, impulses and they want to act on them. I am not trying to turn Michael's accuser, Gavin Arvizo, into a youthful seducer. I am simply trying to say there was almost no public acknowledgment of these everyday facts, known to anyone who has had a child, spent time with children, or remembers being a child."

 

This book is a serious work. And Michael Jackson's rise and fall deserves examination. His trial was the most significant "celebrity happening" of 2005.

 

There are usually second acts in American public life. That the curtain seems to have fallen with such finality for Michael - for whom fame and "love" was everything - this is the grandest of show biz Grand Guignol. (He now lives in self-imposed exile in the Middle East, among wealthy sheiks.) Not to dismiss the pain of his alleged victims, but I find Michael, his story, its outcome, all desperately tragic and unhappy. There's not a winner to be found.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/lifes...-artslife-today

 

Yay another garbage tabloidish book about someone who thinks they are better than everyone else. how fun!

loser..

Edited December 29, 200520 yr by Josh

This is depressing.

its insane and crazy another diabolical book from someone who makes themselves out to be wonderful

This is just bullcrap