Still Here, Alexandra Jacobs
Still Here, Alexandra Jacobs
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Still Here
The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch

Author: Alexandra Jacobs

Narrator: Andréa Burns

Unabridged: 11 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/22/2019


Synopsis

"Narrator Andrea Burns is amazing! Her performance of NEW YORK TIMES editor Jacobs's charming, well-researched look at the life of actor Elaine Stritch (19252014) is at once intelligent, amusing, and illuminating...Wonderfully entertaining listening." — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

The ebullient, troubled life of a Broadway legend who became a heroine to a younger generation

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 Noël 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.

In Still Here, Alexandra Jacobs conveys the full force of Stritch’s sardonic wit and brassy charm while acknowledging her many dark complexities. Following years of meticulous research and interviews, this is a portrait of a powerful, vulnerable, honest, and humorous figure who continues to reverberate in the public consciousness.

About Alexandra Jacobs

Alexandra Jacobs is a longtime features writer, cultural critic, and editor who has worked at The New York Times since 2010. She has contributed to many other publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Observer, and Entertainment Weekly.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Terry

Alexandra Jacobs has done the nearly impossible - she’s turned a fascinating life into a boring book.......more

Goodreads review by V.

Pity Alexandra Jacobs, the biographer of performer Elaine Stritch. Though blessed with ample documentation of Stritch's long and high-profile career on Broadway and in film, she seems to have run across a problem when trying to find contemporaries willing to discuss their relationships with the lege......more

Goodreads review by David

A 5-star book for its storytelling, research and overall intelligence, 'Still Here' rests at 3 stars for its subject; so that rounds out at 4 stars. I read this account of Elaine Stritch's life for two reasons: an interest in the musical 'Company' (in which Stritch had a significant supporting role......more

Elaine Stritch’s name will almost certainly be familiar to you if you’re a fan of musical theatre. With her distinctive gravelly voice, upfront demeanor, and unique fashion sense (she wore black stockings instead of pants most of the time), Stritch was an eccentric and unique talent who never quite......more

Goodreads review by Greg

Delightful, and the audiobook performance was one of the best nonfiction I’ve ever heard.......more