| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. By Renée M. Sentilles. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii, 313 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-521-82070-7.)

Recent years have witnessed the publication of many interesting books on what James Cook has perceptively called the age of Barnum, the three or four decades of the mid-nineteenth century when new forms of commercial popular culture emerged in America's burgeoning cities and many Americans were entranced by widely publicized artful deceptions. This fascinating account of the actress Adah Isaacs Menken is the latest entry into this increasingly crowded field. As Renée M. Sentilles notes, her book is not a conventional biography, but "an investigation of Menken as a deliberate performance, a self-created celebrity who shaped her image to suit the times" (p. 3). Considering Menken's propensity for exaggeration, dissembling, and outright fraud and the paucity of sources untainted by her zealous self-promotion, Sentilles's approach is not merely sensible but ideal for such a subject, and the result is a book that will interest historians working in several different fields.

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