Hello, I'm Richard Nicholas Nimz, prospector of the written word. Biographies are like the more thorough and (hopefully) more respectable version of the tabloids. They dredge up intimate details from a person's life to indulge peoples' hero worship or bile fascination about said person. When done poorly, it's just as sensationalist and dubiously true as the tabloids. When done well, it can create a life-like picture that helps people understand humanity, and even, in the my case with The Great and Only Barnum, can even inspire new role models.
Citation: Fenwick, R. i., & Fleming, C. (2009). The great and only Barnum: the tremendous, stupendous life of showman P.T. Barnum. New York: Schwartz & Wade Books.
Summary: In a small town in Connecticut, a boy who hated doing a hard day's work found out that his vaunted inheritance was actually a snake-infested swamp. Instead of being turned from his daydreams, he spent his life pursuing them. Over the course of his life, he went from making a humbug of an old black woman to respectfully portraying 'ambassadors of the wonderful', from an alcoholic to a champion of temperance, from a man with nothing to the organizer of what would become America's greatest circus.
Impressions: Even despite my admiration for the subject of this autobiography, this is a great book. It's a very thorough account of his life, even including context for his life to make some of his actions make sense. While it doesn't pull any punches about the less admirable aspects of his life, it also shows his moving beyond his flaws. I'd include this in a display on how to write a biography, but because of the numerous side-notes I could also use it as part of a career day display to encourage children to go into zoology.
Second opinion: As in a real circus, the largeformat pages include plenty to grab readers' attention: white-on-black sidebars that put the entrepreneur's feats in context... Audiences will step right up co this illuminating and thorough portrait of an entertainment legend.
Source: The Great and Only Barnum: The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman P.T. Barnum. (2009). Publishers Weekly, 256(35), 60.
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