(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.”
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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.
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feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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