Barnum, Adams' book provides much that is new and exciting to this ongoing discussion. Reviews Finnly rooled in Mikhail Bakhlin and Waller Benjamin as well as P.T. Her book is organized into three 'acts' that focus on particular sites of boundaryblurring engendered by freaks in life and art: science versus entertainment, nonnality versus deviance, and 'natural' versus socialized alienation.

Charting some of the ways in which the term was manipulated, by performers as well as managers, at different times in American history, Adams demonstrates how the tradition capitalized upon historically specific needs for spectacles that, in Adams' words, 'defy the imposition of nonnative categories of identity' (89). Adding an important voice to a dialogue that has included such luminaries as Robert Bogdan, Leslie Fiedler, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Adams goes to some pains to contextualize and historicize the 'freak' to shed new light on the theatrical malleability of that designation. To conceive of freaks in such a way has a magnificent potential, not only for illuminating the history of the freak show theatrical tradition (the scholarship of which hardly matches its immense impact on American cultural life) but also for raising important questions about the naturalization of concepts of 'normal' and 'abnormal.' As significant as this potential may be, the subject of professional 'freakery' is still so controversial that almost all histories of American theatre omit it completely rather than confronting and demystifying its vagaries. 'Freaks,' she writes, 'do not occur in nature they are produced by communities that use the physical body as the primary basis for judgements about inclusion and exclusion' (91). Cherners, Seattle, Washington Rachel Adams's exciting and intellectually challenging book is the most recent of a small cadre of texts that view freak as a performative, rather than essential, identity requiring the participation of the 'enfreaked' subject in much the same manner as any 'legitimate-theatre' actor adapts his or her body to a particular role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. It is a rich source of reading from within disability culture that can be enjoyed for its own sake, and individual pieces can also be easily adapted for introducing a disability perspective into already established courses on literature, drama, performance studies, history, art, and anthropology. Points of Contact is valuable for scholars less familiar with disability studies who wish to acquaint themselves with the art and theory of an emerging field in the humanities, as well as for more established disability studies practitioners. REVIEWS This is an important book in a series from the University of Michigan Press that is theorizing and historicizing disability in many areas of the critical landscape.

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Sideshow U.S.A. by Rachel Adams