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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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