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Loading... A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripleyby Neal Thompson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. an interesting life-somewhat sadder than I should have imagined. Still have do download the app and check out the extras-well researched ( ) 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. 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 âneutralâ reporting actually just reinforcing the status quo? By not dwelling on the more questionable parts of a subjectâs 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. Youâre likely familiar with the âBelieve It Or Not!â brand; there was a TV show about it in the 80s, and there are Ripleyâs 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. Itâs 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 doesnât examine it in a thoughtful way. The larger issue, however, that I just donât think received enough attention in this biography, is the ethics of the entire basis for the Believe It Or Not concept: how âweirdâ 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 Iâm 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 âotheringâ of non-U.S. cultures. And this is where those questions I posed at the start of this review come up. What duty â if any â does the biographer have to the audience to delve deeper into the subjectâs 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 itâs more of the latter, or at least thatâs 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 donât think itâs necessarily cut and dried; Mr. Ripleyâs work did expose many in the U.S. to parts of the world they knew nothing about. But I donât think the default should be that whatever Mr. Ripley did was value-neutral, which is what this book presents. no reviews | add a review
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HTML: A Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert â??Believe It or Notâ? 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. No library descriptions found. |
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