A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.77 (597 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 077043620X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-04-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Louis Post-Dispatch. I was instantly hooked, and my inspiration became an obsession. His 2007 New York Times story about a new Believe It or Not! museum in Times Square, and the man behind it—“a cross between the Coney Island barker and the cultural anthropologist”—set me on the five-year path to this book. In Ripley’s case, he enjoyed life to the extreme and was constantly amazed by it. And yet his over-the-top life story had never been fully told. Phil, The Amazing Race, MythBusters, and Fear Factor.J.M. It was a life-changing moment, when I realized: this this is my story.J.M. - What w
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. *An Best Book of the Month *A Barnes & Noble Booksellers' Pick *An NPR pick for 2013 *A Vanity Fair Hot Type pick *A Publishers Lunch Buzz Book 2013 *An iTunes/iBookstore Best Book of the Month *A Parade magazine 2013 Summer ReadA 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. 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&mda
J. Michael Click said An Unbelievably Interesting Life. Neal Thompson's biography of "Believe It or Not!" founder Robert Ripley is as fascinating as its subject. The book's title is a clever double entendre, for Mr. Ripley was not only "A Curious Man" on a lifelong, worldwide quest to discover the bizarre and unusual, he was a strange and unique phenomenon in his own right.In painstaking detail, the author follows Ripley through his complicated childhood, his early struggles as a newspaper cartoonist, his heyday as a one-man mul. John Y. Chang said A Life as Curious as the Man Who Dared Us to Believe It or Not. Before today's media celebrities, there was Ripley - part showman, artist and creative entrepreneur, he lived a life as curious as the subject of his cartoons.Like many people I grew up seeing the Believe It or Not shows and cartoons, but never thought much of the man behind such curiosities.While some things are more clear now, other parts of Ripley are even more mysterious than ever. We follow him on his classic "rags to riches" story so we learn a lot of how he ended up . "Recommended and worth reading" according to Danny R. Smith Sr.. This book about Mr. Rigley is a very good read. I was absorbed in the effect his life had on his world and the future world. This man was very talented and enjoyed life to its fullest. I felt sorry for him because he was pictured as a self serving , party loving, no morals, happy go lucky individual. Example being when the depression was going on and many suffering, he was at a high level of his career, making a lot of money and spending it on travels, parties, booze and wo