Customer Reviews
Stunning - and no review can do it justice - By: moreredwine, 06 Mar 2008 
What a wonderful delightful surprise this book has been. The Queen of Whale Cay - Joe - was brave, fiercely loyal & completely unique. There never has & never will be anyone like her. A packed life that inspires you to do more with your own. A loyalty to friends that reminds you to look up the ones you've left behind. This book brings Joe's past to life with scenes & stories you could never have imagined. And when I watch old movies from now on I'll recalll the scenes from this book that were happening at the same time. For example Joe's encounters with Marlene Dietrich make me want to watch her (YouTube - that scene from Morocco 1930)movies again. For example scenes from World War 1 - Joe was driving an Ambulance aged just 16. For example Oscar Wildes niece - Dolly Wilde - Joe encountered her at 17 in Paris.
No review can do justice to the book. You'll just have to get it & see.
Weird, but wonderful - By: Beebarf, 10 Feb 2008 
Joe Carstairs was certainly eccentric, but also very talented. I wonder if these days she would be diagnosed with gender dysphoria & offered some kind of treatment? She seemed to deny totallly her feminity, dressing as a male, & affecting a pipe - & having sailor style tattoos, too. Of course, being eccentric is easier when your grandfather was a business partner of Rockefeller & made his fortune from oil - which you then inherited a large slice of. I was intrigued by the author's insight into the craze for "boyishness" in the 1920s, & also I learned something I didn't know about the First World War - the role of Chinese labourers in the trenches & the aftermath. The louche behaviour & extravagant lifestyle was tempered by the work that Carstairs undertook both as motor boat racer but also chauffeuse, so I did admire her, although I later became bemused - the obsession with Lord Tod Wadley, a doll, was freaky.
After leaving the Caribbean, the book becomes very sketchy, which is a shame, & also rather sad, as it seems to indicate some kind of general decline in the energy & fortunes of this remarkable woman.
A slim biography, but a very entertaining one.
lord tod wadleys alter ego - By: , 29 Jul 2003 The life of "Joe"Carstairs is a real journey of a biography,from America in the 1890s,Paris & London in the 20's & cruciallly the Bahamas in the40's.Joe led a truly fast life,always accompanied by her alter ego Lord Tod Wadley.This is a fantastic read,and a far from "run of the mill"biography.What started out as an obituary in The Daily Telegraph turned into something very special.
Wadd a wonderful read! - By: , 07 Jul 2001 An excellent story of weird, wonderful & quite frankly warped behaviour - an obsession with a doll dressed in flying jackets & matelot outfits could not be made up - a terrific yet terrifying account of maverick behaviour from a lady who just could not & would not conform!
scandalous, revealing, charming: a most unlikely life - By: , 02 Apr 2000 Born in the same year as the Queen Mother (1900) the life of Marion Barbara ("Joe") Carstairs took a very different course. A wonderful & beautifully written account of an outrageous twentieth century personality. The story moves from the battlefields of World War I to an island paradise in the Bahamas via the louche & fast society of London in the Twenties. Those met on the way include Talllulah Bankhead, Dolly Wilde, Marlene Dietrich & the Duke & Duchess of Windsor.
