PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Daugherty – a seasoned biographer with a gift for lively storytelling – does a fine job of evoking the early influences and forces that shaped his subject.
Karen Abbot
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...an exhaustively researched, hugely entertaining work of popular history that...exhumes a colorful crew of once-celebrated characters and restores them to full-blooded life ... My single, small complaint—one that has been made by earlier reviewers of Ms. Abbott’s books and that she pre-emptively addresses in a prefatory note—is that she cannot resist embellishing her tale with the kinds of novelistic flourishes that, if one is a stickler for strict historical accuracy, can seem like an unwarranted self-indulgence ... Still, for all the painstaking research that clearly went into her project, Ms. Abbott doesn’t pretend to be a scholar. Her métier is narrative nonfiction and—as this vibrant, enormously readable book makes clear—she is one of the masters of the art.
