The photographs of her family life come as a revelation, allowing us to finally see her as a complete person instead of just the object of wide-eyed stares. We see Bettie with her mother, sisters, and brothers and a variety of boyfriends. We see her sitting on the stoop with neighborhood kids, dancing like a chorus girl with her sister Goldie, and posed with her fellow students in high school photos (she was voted "most likely to succeed").

The text that accompanies the photographs rigidly sticks to the facts without any theorizing about the Bettie Page image and the effect it wreaked on the libidos of men around the world. Instead, the text plainly and flatly gives us everything about Bettie that the authors could dig up, including dozens of interviews with photo club members and old boyfriends.

Her photographers voice in unison how easy Bettie was to work with. No matter how poor the lighting, how shoddy the sets, or how cold the ocean surf, Bettie always came to life when the camera shutters were clicking.

Disappointingly though, the authors fail to describe how Bettie Page was finally rediscovered. Instead of playing her rediscovery as a mystery revealed, the authors flatly state that she was featured on Life Styles of the Rich and Famous and then the mystery was over. Why Life Styles? How did they get the inside story on Bettie? Was a reporter responsible for ferreting out her whereabouts? Don't look to this book for an answer to any of these questions. As a result, the book fails to capitalize on the inherent drama present in her life.

But even with its shortcomings, the book is still a revelation, finally allowing us to hear Bettie speak about her own life ("From the first time I posed nude, I wasn't embarrassed"), about the troubles she faced ("We were so poor that we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings") and about the reasons that she suddenly gave up her modeling career (a combination of overzealous fans stalking her and the added pressures of senate investigations into pornography). And its doubly hard to complain about any book packed with such astonishing photos as the ones you'll find in this book.

Bettie was truly one of a kind, imbuing her every pose with an energy and excitement that must be seen to be fully appreciated. In some pictures, she becomes the personification of the girl next door, all gentle smiles and graceful poses, whether she's frolicking in the surf while wearing a teensy bikini or posing buck naked in starkly-lit studios for camera enthusiasts. (Buck Henry, who was present at some of the camera club photo shoots, suggests that many of the photographers didn't even have film in their cameras.) And in other photos she becomes the dark angel of S&M fantasies, cracking a whip while her eyes take on a fire absent from her good girl poses. This schism in her character and how easily she moved back and forth between the two different personas is largely responsible for her fame. If she was just one or the other, she would have been remembered but not in the same way. In keeping with the '50s attitudes toward sex, Bettie Page broke sex into two opposite categories--the easily available (hey, here's the girl next door) and the secretly naughty and wicked. No other performer has captured this schism of attitudes so clearly and forthrightly.