Each biographer reveals another layer of it’s subject. But when your subject is the Queen of Strippers how can there be anything else to reveal? Karen (Sin in the Second City) Abbott rises to the challenge and slips under Gypsy Rose Lee’s body paint and lace bows.  American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee is tells the intertwining stories of four immigrant brothers who created an empire  and the unlovely, lumpy child vaudevillian from a damaged family who grew up to become one of their biggest stars and a household name for most of the 20th century.

American Rose works as a standalone biography, but if you’ve read any other Gypsy Rose Lee biographies (Gypsy, Gypsy & Me, Stripping Gyspy) any suspicions you may have had about Gypsy Rose Lee and her family are supported. Not a member of the extended Hovick clan emerged from childhood without scars, seen and unseen.

Sister June briefly talks about her mother Rose’s boyfriends who crept into her bed at night on the road, a revelation that chills the spine just as much as the descriptions of her battered body after each performance. And you’re left wondering which left the more lasting scars and strengths as young June moves onto to marathon dancing and the legitimate theater world.  The sense that everyone was nothing more than things to Gypsy? What sister would send her younger sibling to a backroom “circus” party to try and get her break into the theater world? Or use her only child as a prop to negotiate everything from car repairs to contracts?

And as the Hovick family acts out it’s drama of damaged generations, the Minsky brothers break free of their respectable retail background and trade in a much more alluring trade, the female form, helping create the DNA of the strip tease that still lingers today. When Minsky meets Hovick, the fireworks that ensue change the very burlesque world.

Fast moving and full of tiny comments and scenes that tear at your heart, American Rose is a must read for the burlesque fan and the curious. The price you pay at the bookstore is nothing compared to the prices the brother Minsky and the Hovick clan paid…