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Loading... The Chicken Ranch: The True Story of the Best Little Whorehouse in Texasby Jan Hutson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I found this book to be invaluable as I directed and choreographed The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Although there are little citations I did find the story to be fascinating. It definitely helped situate my mind into the legend that is The Chicken Ranch. ( ) This book almost single-handedly started me on a three-plus year odyssey to research and write my own book about the infamous La Grange brothel known as the Chicken Ranch. To be charitable, Hutson's work is mercifully unburdened by anything approaching fact. She includes no sources, has some very strange ideas about Texas history and the only quotes she includes were directly lifted from newspapers or the Texas Monthly and Playboy articles regarding the Chicken Ranch. I'd say 80 percent of this rather slim book is pure fiction, and that may be a generous estimate. There aren't many other books out about the Chicken Ranch, but anything is better than this drek. You have been warned. no reviews | add a review
Operating just outside of Houston for 130 years, the Chicken Ranch was probably the oldest continually active brothel in America. Now readers can leam all about it: its long and often lurid history, the countless colorful characters who worked there, were its clients, its enemies, or its supporters. The book has all the verve and vivaciousness of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the hit Broadway play about events at the Chicken Ranch. It is a ribald, rousing, and witty account of thirteen decades of social change as revealed in the unguarded moments and most personal behavior of people of all sorts -- at their best and their worst. From its founding in 1844 to its closing in 1974 after a stormy media battle, the Chicken Ranch assumed an almost legendary reputation in the Southwest. It was in the naughty dreams of every Texas schoolboy, and it was part of the naughtier reality of the many politicians who slept there. Author Jan Hutson provides a close-up view of a gallery of American personalities. There are the madams: Mrs. Swine, Miss Jessie, Edna Milton, and others. There is the sheriff, Jim Flournoy, who fought to keep the Ranch open (and thus keep vice controlled), battling against television reporter Marvin Zindler, who wanted to close it down (while bringing his ratings up). The descriptions of these and other men and women involved with the Chicken Ranch make unforgettable reading. The Chicken Ranch is a fascinating cross section of American life. It is the enormously human, inescapably humorous story of the habits, hangups, hatreds, loves, and lives of real people. It is not only exciting, intriguing, and entertaining -- it is true. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.7Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, loveLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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