BOOK
183: A CURIOUS MAN: THE STRANGE AND BRILLIANT LIFE OF ROBERT "BELIEVE IT
OR NOT!" RIPLEY: NEAL THOMPSON
A
Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert
"Believe It or Not" Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned
globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's
strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in
the unbelievable.
As
portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley's life is the stuff of
a classic American fairy tale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley
turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness
of the world. After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at age
eighteen, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his "Believe It or
Not" conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it birthed that would make
him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him
to search the globe's farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human
curiosities, and shocking phenomena.
Ripley
delighted in making outrageous declarations that somehow always turned out to
be true--such as that Charles Lindbergh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly
across the Atlantic or that "The Star Spangled Banner"
was not the national anthem. Assisted by an exotic harem of female
admirers and by ex-banker Norbert Pearlroth, a devoted researcher who spoke
eleven languages, Ripley simultaneously embodied the spirit of Peter Pan, the
fearlessness of Marco Polo and the marketing savvy of P. T. Barnum.
In
a very real sense, Ripley sought to remake the world's aesthetic. He demanded
respect for those who were labeled "eccentrics" or
"freaks"--whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 1,615 alphabet
letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose.
By
the 1930s Ripley possessed a vast fortune, a private yacht, and a twenty-eight
room mansion stocked with such "oddities" as shrunken heads and
medieval torture devices, and his pioneering firsts in print, radio, and
television were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness--a
taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest,
biggest, dumbest and most weird. Today, that legacy continues and can be seen
in reality TV, YouTube, America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass,
MythBusters and a host of other pop-culture phenomena.
In
the end Robert L. Ripley changed everything. The supreme irony of his
life, which was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual, is that he may
have been the most amazing oddity of all.
(From
the Hardcover edition.)
MY
VERDICT: Despite that fact that I was eager to know the story behind Ripley, of
Believe it or Not fame, and I have been wanting to read this book for ages, I was
disappointed with this book. It dragged quite a bit and although there are some
interesting facts, especially when you relate things to specific people and events
from the past, the book is just too long. I would also have liked to see a few
more of Ripley’s cartoons in the middle.
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