Reviewed in Brief

Center Ring: The People of the Circus, by Robert Lewis Taylor. 250 pp. New York: Doubleday & Company. $3.50

What the circus once brought to a small town was not only parades, glitter, and pink lemonade, but the circus people themselves—the freaks, the dedicated nomads, the real, live, unliterary Outsiders, whose outlaw image entered the average citizen’s precincts once a year, and stirred him, healthily, to consider his own excesses of conformity. But as of this year, the Big Top stopped rising summer mornings in vacant fields all over America, leaving a whole generation of children without the possibility of remembering themselves sneaking under a tent. By way of obit, Robert Lewis Taylor has collected his New Yorker profiles of Ringling Brothers’ truest monstres sacrés, from Mr. Ringling himself to Gargantua’s press agent.

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Robert Phelps

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Center Ring: The People of the Circus, by Robert Lewis Taylor. 250 pp. New York: Doubleday & Company. $3.50

What the circus once brought to a small town was not only parades, glitter, and pink lemonade, but the circus people themselves—the freaks, the dedicated nomads, the real, live, unliterary Outsiders, whose outlaw image entered the average citizen’s precincts once a year, and stirred him, healthily, to consider his own excesses of conformity. But as of this year, the Big Top stopped rising summer mornings in vacant fields all over America, leaving a whole generation of children without the possibility of remembering themselves sneaking under a tent. By way of obit, Robert Lewis Taylor has collected his New Yorker profiles of Ringling Brothers’ truest monstres sacrés, from Mr. Ringling himself to Gargantua’s press agent.