Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch by: Alexandra Jacobs
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 337 pages, b&w illustrations. Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch's life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway's great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential-and often fraught-collaborations she developed with Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers. Remainder dot on top edge, otherwise clean.