(Crown, $26)
It’s a wonder Robert Ripley’s story hasn’t been this fully told before, said Matthew Hays in Maclean’s. The man behind Ripley’s Believe It or Not led a life “every bit as crazy as one might expect.” The trivia-filled illustrated newspaper column that he began drawing in 1918 eventually led to a radio program, film shorts, and a chain of “Odditoriums” around the world. Along the way, he managed to become a national handball champion, visit almost every nation on Earth, and draw a salary equal to that of the chief of General Motors. Neal Thompson’s biography is a fittingly sweeping take on a life that’s “begging for a big-screen biopic treatment.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
But Thompson’s book is less a portrait of a man than of a type of curiosity Ripley embodied, said Megan Abbott in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Ripley’s daily wonder chamber tapped into a hunger his audience shared. In the account we get of the last years before his death in 1949 from a heart attack at 58, Ripley’s own impulse to collect homes, women, and odd treasures starts to look like a desperate attempt to ward off deeper introspection about a world that was proving darker than his dream of it. Even so, his initial impulse remains ours—to explore and somehow make a personal connection to a world that’s at once vast and shrinking.