Freaky Book
This book screams out "spontaneous purchase," though it's not for the weak-stomached: Secrets of the Sideshows. Excerpt from a review:
Today, with few exceptions, like Jim Rose's traveling geek-o-rama, or Todd Browning's Coney Island 10-in-1, the sideshow is dead. Not because of political correctness, Nickell reveals, but because of old fashioned economics, sometimes called greed. There's more money in a big ride gobbling up space on the midway, than in a geek in a tent gobbling down mice. Rides are the carnival form of urban sprawl, a shallow mechanical thrill for a generation that finds little fascination beyond what glows on a screen. One could say we've become our own freaks in our own tent - without an audience.
[Y]ou will be more than satisfied to learn from Nickell that Francois Battalia, who ate stones like popcorn, every few weeks “voided a great quantity of sand.” Or, before you swallow and regurgitate a live mouse, you must first blow smoke in its face as a tranquilizer so it won't gnaw into your stomach lining. Similar wonderment awaits you from torture acts, bearded women, hermaphrodites, knife throwers and others. Beyond that, the deeper secrets of the sideshow are forever written in sand. Nickell's devotedly assembled cavalcade on paper, nonetheless, is a worthwhile attraction in the bibliographic grind show of freak lit.
Side note: It's an intelligent review, but a great example of the 300-year-old tradition of Catholic bashing. At two points, the reviewer makes wholly-gratuitous insults about Catholicism (one about Papal pronouncements and the other about the kindly Thomas Aquinas, "the world's fatest theologian"--an inaccurate statement since STA wasn't a theologian but a philosopher, and, though fat, wasn't nearly as heavy as the comment implies.
