A solid yet playful tour of the huckster’s world.
Schroeder unfurls eight stellar scams—perpetrated from the Philippines to your Phillips radio—that shook the gullible for all they were worth.
As long as you are not on the receiving end, scams are enormously entertaining. Here readers learn of the Tasaday deception, the 18th-century Shakespeare fraud (with its sad father-son conflict), Orson Welles’ radio hysteria (said Orson: “Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan”), along with plenty of plain old swindles serving as cautionary tales that we may never learn from, as greed, need and desperation always have the upper hand. What makes Schroeder’s presentation of these bamboozlements so pleasurable—other than the gotcha! factor—is the clarity of his narrative, the unhurried exploration of the dupe and the fact that the only things that get hurt here are egos and pocketbooks. He has also chosen the fleecings for their color—of the P.T. Barnum sort—rather than the darker work of Enron or no-bid military contracts. Simard’s accompanying artwork lays out in grayscale the raw bones of the flimflams, driving home the salient moments when the ruse worked and then when things went south.
A solid yet playful tour of the huckster’s world. (Nonfiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55451-351-2
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
In this companion to Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their Work (1998), Sullivan presents an album of the prominent ships and men who fought on both sides, matched to an engrossing account of the war's progress: at sea, on the Mississippi, and along the South's well-defended coastline. In his view, the issue never was in doubt, for though the Confederacy fought back with innovative ironclads, sleek blockade runners, well-armed commerce raiders, and sturdy fortifications, from the earliest stages the North was able to seal off, and then take, one major southern port after another. The photos, many of which were made from fragile glass plates whose survival seems near-miraculous, are drawn from private as well as public collections, and some have never been published before. There aren't any action shots, since mid-19th-century photography required very long exposure times, but the author compensates with contemporary prints, plus crisp battle accounts, lucid strategic overviews, and descriptions of the technological developments that, by war's end, gave this country a world-class navy. He also profiles the careers of Matthew Brady and several less well-known photographers, adding another level of interest to a multi-stranded survey. (source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7613-1553-5
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Twenty-First Century/Millbrook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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