I Put a Spell on You: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna

Women with pizzazz. Dances that shock and enchant. With heroines like Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan, this was never going to be a conventional history.Buonaventura’s latest book is rich with fascinating anecdotes (like the New Jersey girl arrested for dancing the Turkey Trot on her lunch hour) and astonishing facts (the first geisha were men), as well as tender portrayals of dancers whose stage antics have earned them lasting fame.Buonaventura heads to Argentina and the immigrants inventing tango in Buenos Aires; to Paris and the bawdy entertainers of the Moulin Rouge; to Chicago and New York, where struggling black Americans cakewalk, charleston and shimmy their long road from slavery. She returns to the Middle East, and the Arabic dance...