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A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley

di Neal Thompson

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2922589,497 (3.68)7
Biography & Autobiography. History. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:

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 t
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an interesting life-somewhat sadder than I should have imagined. Still have do download the app and check out the extras-well researched ( )
  cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |
Although I've decided I don't very much like the man Robert Ripley became, I must give this four stars for an excellent and engaging biography. Ripley seems to me to have been a very selfish man---the epitome of a man ruined by fame and fortune. The last 30-40 pages bummed me out as he declined and died as most men like him do---unhappy and alone.

There is a Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum in Newport, Oregon that I've visited a couple times. It's spooky---but not scary. I never really understood why I felt so weirded out there, but after reading this, I sorta get it. There were so many interesting parts to his life and story that I can't do them all justice in a short review. As a blogger, I thought it was fun how the author compared Ripley's travel narratives to blogging. I'd always wondered about shrunken heads and how that was even possible---now I'm thinking these heads were without skulls. I did feel like too much was made of his buckteeth; calling them a handicap, even, at one point. Surely someone with a real handicap might beg to differ---or maybe this straight-toothed girl just can't sympathize.

Definitely a good read---but don't expect to think highly of Ripley when you're through. ( )
  classyhomemaker | Dec 11, 2023 |
Fascinating account of Ripley's life ( )
  therestlessmouse | Oct 8, 2022 |
nonfic/bio (man from Santa Rosa CA becomes wildly successful) an interesting life, for sure, though he was definitely a man with many flaws. ( )
  reader1009 | Jul 3, 2021 |
This book raised some questions about what we should expect from biographers. Are they merely relating details of the life of a person, or should they provide more of a commentary on that life as well? Is what we might consider to be ‘neutral’ reporting actually just reinforcing the status quo? By not dwelling on the more questionable parts of a subject’s personality, is the biographer acting in an appropriate manner, or are they implicitly giving their approval by not spending more time examining those characteristics?

Robert Ripley is the subject of this biography. You’re likely familiar with the “Believe It Or Not!” brand; there was a TV show about it in the 80s, and there are Ripley’s museums in San Francisco and NYC. Mr. Ripley started as a cartoonist in the early 1900s, eventually travelling the world to visit over 200 countries, collecting information about parts of the world that were extremely foreign to people in the U.S., especially before the frequent use of photography or radio programming. This straightforward biography follows Mr. Ripley from his birth in Santa Rosa, California through to his death in New York nearly 60 years later.

The author, Mr. Thompson, is a fine writer. I hesitated a bit in the beginning, distracted by other books I received as gifts for Christmas. However, I sped through the second half of the book today, finishing it up as the Texans got destroyed by Kansas City in the playoffs. It’s written well, and I think maybe five or ten years ago I would have strongly recommended it for anyone interested in learning more about this particular figure in U.S. history.

But these days, I have more questions. For example, Mr. Ripley clearly had some misogynistic tendencies, and while Mr. Thompson does mention this (which a lesser author might gloss over even further), he doesn’t examine it in a thoughtful way. The larger issue, however, that I just don’t think received enough attention in this biography, is the ethics of the entire basis for the Believe It Or Not concept: how “weird” the world is outside of the U.S. I get the sense from this biography that Mr. Ripley felt that he respected other cultures, but I’m not entirely sure that he did. He was certainly well-traveled, and developed strong affinities for certain cultures (especially China), but his cartoons at times dipped into racist territory, and his collections of curios and oddities really just seems like a whole lot of ‘othering’ of non-U.S. cultures.

And this is where those questions I posed at the start of this review come up. What duty – if any – does the biographer have to the audience to delve deeper into the subject’s actions? Is a biographer merely a stenographer, pulling together clippings and filling in the blanks, or is he or she an investigative reporter, looking deeper into the subject and placing at least some level of judgment on the actions the subject has taken throughout his or her life? I think it’s more of the latter, or at least that’s my feeling after reading this book. Mr. Thompson spends really no ink exploring whether it was ethical or appropriate for a white man to travel to Africa and bring back and display (out of context) parts of the cultures on that continent. I don’t think it’s necessarily cut and dried; Mr. Ripley’s work did expose many in the U.S. to parts of the world they knew nothing about. But I don’t think the default should be that whatever Mr. Ripley did was value-neutral, which is what this book presents. ( )
  ASKelmore | Jul 9, 2017 |
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Biography & Autobiography. History. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:

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 t

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