"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."
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