On Michael Jackson

November 28, 2005
Pulitzer-winning New York Times
critic Jefferson collects her meditations on what may be the oddest show-biz figure of all time. "Freaks" is the title of her first essay, and she notes Jackson's attraction to Barnum as well as the strangely apt imagery of his best-known video, "Thriller." Born in 1958 to a bullying father and a mother who was a Jehovah's Witness convert, the youngest member of the Jackson Five quickly became its VIP. Child stars are never "normal," and Jefferson glances at Buster Keaton, Jackie Coogan, Sammy Davis Jr. and, of course, Shirley Temple, the only one of them even more famous than Jackson, unless you count Elizabeth Taylor, Jackson's "best friend," who supplanted Diana Ross as his apparent role model. Jackson, Jefferson believes, is a "sexual impersonator," imitating, at times, a gay man, a white woman, a "gangsta" and a "pop Count Dracula." His bizarre looks and behavior drew literally thousands of cameras to his 2005 trial for child molestation. Jefferson concludes that Jackson may be a "monstrous child," but that he is, to a degree, a mirror of us all. Her slim, smart volume of cultural analysis may remind readers of Susan Sontag's early, brilliant essays on pop culture.

November 1, 2005
Known as the -king of pop, - singer Jackson has certainly had his share of problems. Here, Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize -winning columnist for the New York Times, reflects on his character, his fame, his musical talents, and other facets of his life.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2005
Longtime " New York Times" writer Jefferson devotes her short first book to the man who surely must be the most interesting living American entertainer. She tries to account for how Michael Jackson became what he is, beginning with the chapter "Freaks," which uses Jackson's interest in P. T. Barnum--he gives copies of the great bunkum artist's autobiography to all who work for him--to suggest that Jackson is not uninterested in being a freak and is intrigued by public deception and deliberate ambiguity (when a Barnum attraction was shown up as phony, Barnum wouldn't dispute revealed truth but also wouldn't retract the falsehood; that way, both truth and falsehood became means of attracting paying customers). In "Home" and "Star Child," Jefferson brings in the domestic and professional peculiarities, many of them pretty unwholesome, that nurtured Jackson's narcissism and perfectionism and led him to become the nonpareil physical figure she considers in "Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex"--that is, an apparently raceless, sexless, humanlike being. Finally, "The Trial" discusses how Jackson prevailed against child molestation charges and speculates on his guilt or innocence, inclining to the latter because of Jackson's fetishization of childlike innocence, positing that Jackson is tempted to molest but gets his kicks, as it were, out of always resisting. Replete with exegesis of Jackson's exceptional dancing and his great music videos and how they derive from African American entertainment traditions and relate to Jackson and his public's fascinations, this is one smart little book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)