Author:Paula Uruburu Availability:
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Editorial Review:
The scandalous story of America's first supermodel, sex goddess, and modern celebrity, Evelyn Nesbit, the temptress at the center of Stanford White's famous murder, whose iconic life story reflected all the paradoxes of America's Gilded Age. Known to millions before her sixteenth birthday in 1900, Evelyn Nesbit was the most photographed woman of her era, an iconic figure who set the standard for female beauty. Women wanted to be her. Men just wanted her. When her life of fantasy became all too real, and her jealous millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw, killed her lover--celebrity architect Stanford White, builder of the Washington Square Arch and much of New York City--she found herself at the center of the "Crime of the Century" and the popular courtroom drama that followed--a scandal that signaled the beginning of a national obsession with youth, beauty, celebrity, and sex. The story of Evelyn Nesbit is one of glamour, money, romance, sex, madness, and murder, and Paula Uruburu weaves all of these elements into an elegant narrativethat reads like the best fiction-- only it's all true. American Eve goes far beyond just literary biography; it paints a picture of America as it crossed from the Victorian era into the modern, foreshadowing so much of our contemporary culture today.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Facinating Read:
I have read everything I could ever find on Evelyn Nesbit so I was very excited when "American Eve" came out. What a facinating, juicy story. I think the author relied a lot on Evelyn's memoirs. I wonder if those appendicitis attacks were really pregnancies. But Evelyn never owns up to that in her memories. This book has everything, money, sex, scandal, murder--you gotta love it. The photos in the book of Evelyn are worth the price of the book alone. I would have liked to have seen a photo of Evelyn in old... more info
I'm hard to please and I loved this book:
This is a good yarn. It's told well, and keeps you going, wanting to know what happens next. It's hard for me to find books that keep me engaged. This book is riveting. I highly recommend it.
Wow!:
Like a few other reviewer's here, I'd never heard of Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White or Harry Thaw, and only picked up this book on a fluke. What a pleasant surprise to read about one of the first "trial of the centuries" and the "girl in the red velvet swing". Paula Uruburu has done a spendid job of making the reader feel the gilded age, the stuffy social scene and didn't bore this reader with an endless account of the trial like so many other true crime novels. Highly recommended!
(3.5 stars) Intriguing story of the original "It Girl":
On June 25, 1906, wealthy millionaire Harry K. Thaw killed his wife's Evelyn Nesbit's, former lover, the famous architect Stanford White, at Madison Square Garden. Evelyn, age 20, had spent the past five or six years of her life in the public eye as a model in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, but nothing could have prepared her for the publicity that occurred in the aftermath of the killing. American Eve is primarily about Evelyn's life, and not quite so much about the murder and subsequent... more info
