Overview

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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9780385366359

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Reviews

<p> A Curious Man is the rollicking, terrific story of one of America's greatest men. America needs this book right now: to remember who we really are...Ripley brought back to an awed nation the richness of an endlessly exotic world, and Neal Thompson tells the story with a perfectly-pitched sense of what makes such a man, and a nation, tick. <br>--Peter Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Dog Stars <br> <br> The breathtaking life of a quintessential American: a Frankenstein monster stitched together with equal parts genius, bravado, insecurity, and propaganda. A master of oddities, Ripley himself was the purest form of his own collection and Neal Thompson is his wondrous exhibitor. <br> --Brad Meltzer, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Inner Circle <br> Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the history of a time can be resolved in the biography of a few stout and earnest people. Robert Ripley was certainly one of those and, in this fascinating account, Neal Thompson rescues for us a colorful slice of history. <br> -Colum McCann, bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin <br> <br> Anyone who wants to understand America needs to read this book...Neal Thompson gives us a vivid portrait of this complex, restless man in all his maniacally conflicted glory. <br>--Ben Fountain, Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and author of the National Book Award Finalist Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk <br> <br> Intelligent and gripping...Neal Thompson expertly captures the surprisingly complex character of Robert Ripley, and a life nearly too fantastic to be believed. <br>--Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City and American Rose <br> <br> Neal Thompson has written the book many writers dream of -- the Great American rags-to-riches story--and done it in an intoxicating way. The story of the man who created 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not' is a rip-roaring tale of head-shaking amazement. <br> -- Marc J. Seifer, author of Wizard:

Neal Thompson has written the book many writers dream of -- the Great American rags-to-riches story--and done it in an intoxicating way. The story of the man who created Ripley's Believe It Or Not is a rip-roaring tale of head-shaking amazement as Ripley evolves from a Roaring Twenties newspaper cartoonist into one of the most outrageous and influential globe-trotting characters of modern times. Friends with Rube Goldberg, Walter Winchell and a gaggle of Eurasian concubines, Ripley was a trendsetter in radio and TV as well as the print media. His effervescent vision and irresistible entree into a world of mystery and puzzlement changed the way we look at life and at ourselves. The book is simply a wonderful read!<br> -- Marc J. Seifer, author of Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla <br> <br> Anyone who wants to understand America needs to read this book. Robert Ripley was a man not just of his time, but far ahead of his time, a visionary who invented blogging seventy years before the Internet, foresaw the resurgence of Islam and its clash with the West, and pre-dated Hugh Hefner with his revolving harems of beautiful women. For better or worse, Ripley did as much as anyone to shape American pop culture, and Neal Thompson gives us a vivid portrait of this complex, restless man in all his maniacally conflicted glory. <br>--Ben Fountain, Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and author of the National Book Award Finalist Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk <br> <br> Neal Thompson has written a biography of a man who was as unusual as the items he collected for his 'Believe it or Not' cartoons. As Thompson recounts Ripley's hair-raising -- and globe-trotting -- travels and travails, he gets beneath the explorer-showman's skin. Not only is the book packed with such oddities as the man who ate sixty eggs a day for a week, or the spry gent who was hefting stunning weight at 147 years old, it captures the era in which Ripley, one of the most famous men of his time, li

Author Information

<p>NEAL THOMPSON is the critically acclaimed author of Light This Candle, Driving with the Devil, and Hurricane Season and has contributed to such publications as Outside, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons. You can find him at www.nealthompson.com.

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