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12/8/09: Spectacle of Deformity

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By Doug Fabrizio

Salt Lake City, Utah – If you've got complaints about today's entertainment industry, consider these words in the British periodical "Punch." It was 1847, and the writer bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." It was the age of the freak show and in a new book University of Utah historian Nadja Durbach takes a look at characters like the Elephant Man and a hairy seven-year-old advertised as Darwin's "missing link." Tuesday, she joins us to talk about "otherness" and what it teaches us about ourselves.

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