A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert ‘Believe It or Not!’ Ripley by Neal Thompson

(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.”

Ripley’s story is “a weird mix of idiosyncrasy and archetypical Horatio Alger myth,” said Eric Allen Been in the Chicago Tribune. Born into a poor Santa Rosa, Calif., household, he was a gawky, socially isolated high school dropout when he began selling cartoons to major newspapers. His comic-page panels initially featured sports-themed facts, but Ripley and a loyal researcher soon moved on to shrunken heads and other such curiosities. A Curious Man reads as “mostly hagiography,” but examples of Ripley’s sometimes “boneheaded bias” do creep in. In one circa-1920 dispatch, Ripley wrote that “the Japs and Jews are the only civilized peoples with a fundamental religion of their own.”

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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.