A goodies-filled account of a company just as fascinating as its subject matter.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! (Ripley’s Time Warp, 2018, etc.) celebrates a century of amassing curios and unbelievable facts.
This colorful, oversized book opens with a short but detailed biography of company founder and namesake, Robert Ripley. Born in 1890, Ripley was a socially awkward boy who turned his love for art into a career as a cartoonist. When working for the New York Globe in 1918, he created a cartoon panel called “Champs and Chumps,” a compilation of impressive athletic achievements that most consider the inception of Believe It Or Not! We learn about everything from his romances and handball obsession to his love of traveling. After his death in 1949, the company carried on, eventually adding to Ripley’s extensive collection of artifacts from around the world, like Marilyn Monroe’s gown (“the World’s Most Expensive Dress!”). While the collector had been involved in Vitaphone, radio, and TV productions, Believe It Or Not! continued in television and subsequently found its way online in the digital age. The book spotlights the lead cartoonists, from Ripley’s death to the present day, as well as lead researchers, including Norbert Pearlroth, whom Ripley hired in 1923 and who held the position for an astounding 53 years. There’s abundant coverage of places Ripley toured, like India, Africa, and, his favorite country to visit, China; specifics on artifacts collected, including shrunken heads from Ecuador; and descriptions of various attractions, like the company’s trademark Odditoriums, with locations worldwide. As in previous Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! publications, this book is jam-packed with full-page photographs and illustrations. A couple of pages are foldouts, like Ripley’s India-inspired cartoons, and there’s even a two-page collage of the company’s book covers. But the book also prominently features Ripley’s original artwork and comes with replicas (affixed to pages) of such items as an Odditorium pass and a Ripley-designed Christmas card that he would send to friends. Readers will surely appreciate images of Ripley’s personal collection, which filled three homes at the time of his death. But there are more recent acquisitions, too: African fantasy coffins (hard-carved coffins of unusual designs, such as a Mercedes Benz); Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber from the first two Star Wars films; and an artist’s rendering of James Bond’s 1960s Aston Martin made of recycled cardboard and glue. Equally intriguing are highlights of Ripley’s sometimes-provocative cartoons. For example, he published a cartoon soon after Charles Lindbergh’s famous 1927 flight, claiming Lindbergh was the 67th man to make a nonstop flight over the Atlantic Ocean. (This inflamed readers since it seemingly undermined Lindbergh’s achievement. It was a factual statement, however, as Ripley was accounting for all flights, not merely the solo ones.) The work fully catalogs present-day projects (museums and regularly published books) as well as things of yesteryear, such as television series (the Dean Cain–hosted 2000 revival remains in syndication). Overall, it’s a comprehensive package, with illuminating tidbits on Ripley—the man and the franchise.
A goodies-filled account of a company just as fascinating as its subject matter.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60991-240-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ripley Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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