PositiveThe New York Times\"Fox’s book is less about war than the winding path home ... Much of the pleasure of The Confidence Men comes from the bewildering pluck of these young men of the empire ... Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine, gradually leading from Yozgad to freedom by way of secret codes, a hidden camera, buried clues, fake suicides and a lot of ingenious mumbo jumbo ... At moments, The Confidence Men has the high gloss of a story polished through years of telling and retelling. Indeed, Hill and Jones each wrote lively chronicles of the escape. To make the material her own, Fox inserts a fresh \'mystery\' into the drama, namely: \'How in the world was this preposterous plan actually able to succeed?\' Without breaking stride, she answers that question with brisk detours into mind control, telepathy, mentalism and the like.
Miles Harvey
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... jaunty, far-ranging ... Despite the frontier setting, there is something eerily contemporary about Harvey’s portrait of a real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative relationship to debt and a genius for mass media ... Harvey deploys small scraps of knowledge to great effect. His account of Strang’s rise and fall is littered with thumbnail histories of 19th-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati and much else. This approach amounts to a sort of historical pointillism, bringing the manic, skittering mood of the era into focus. It is a style of history well suited to the antebellum decades, when American culture was most unabashedly itself — uprooted, credulous and bold with scattershot plans for civic and moral perfection ... Harvey’s wonderfully digressive narrative is interspersed with news clippings, playbills, land surveys and daguerreotypes, as if to periodically certify that all of this madness is really true. Strang himself, however, remains a cipher. Where did the calculation end and the delusion begin? Did he himself ever convert to his own gospel? In any case, the inner life of a prophet is less interesting than his or her effect on the world. Tinhorn revelators are seldom in short supply. Few of them secure private theocracies ... Rather than a probing biography of a single man, Harvey offers a vivid portrait of the time and place in which a character like Strang could thrive, an era when \'reality was porous\' and an anxious population cast about for something exciting to believe in and someone confident to follow. Once it is written, the history of our current moment won’t be the story of any particular scoundrel. Confidence men are always among us. It takes extraordinary circumstances for one to become king.
Neil Shister
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Shister is at his best when describing Burning Man’s cultural precursors in the Bay Area and his family’s adventures on the playa, as the salt flat is known. His enthusiasm for the festival’s super-charged civic atmosphere...corrects the common view of Black Rock City as an al fresco Studio 54 ... Mr. Shister’s attempts to capture his brimming zeal on the page sometimes result in him sounding like a painfully square Hunter S. Thompson hopped up on 2% milk ... Unfortunately, Radical Ritual far too often departs the playa for the home office ... One doubts that even the most devoted Burner will be interested in personnel changes at Black Rock City LLC and its successor, the nonprofit Burning Man Project ... At times, Radical Ritual reads like a book inadvertently about the tech industry, or at least the stories techies tell themselves. The same guileless fervor that makes Mr. Shister a charming guide as he pedals his bike from one \'peak experience\' to the next can feel downright sinister when, for instance, he compares the wonderful \'gifting\' culture on the playa to the ways tech monopolies are \'narrowing the divide between the work and personal sides of an employee’s life\' by feeding them smoothies and washing their clothes ... Despite Mr. Shister’s sanguine outlook and a handful of admirable examples, the view from the Bay Area suggests that nine days of sexual liberation, psychedelic exploration and cashless communalism does not trigger much in the way of social progress.
Adam Morris
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Morris’s selection of prophets and cranks is representative rather than definitive. He does an admirable job of knitting their histories into a pleasantly overstuffed narrative that parallels the evolution of the U.S. itself. Taken as a whole, the story of the \'revolutionary microsocieties\' they founded forms a vivid history of American anxiety and hope ... Mr. Morris wisely avoids drawing much distinction between the huckster and the zealot. His small-time messiahs were all somewhere in between: Every one of them was their own first convert. Yet he also remains clear-eyed about the danger of charismatic fanatics. His story ends in 1978 at Jonestown, in Guyana, where more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple died. It is a scene so horrific that it almost reframes the preceding two centuries of messianic experimentation into mere prelude. Yet nothing remotely like the violence at Jonestown ever occurred within any of the other messianic societies. On the contrary, despite their folly and occasional corruption, these movements served as unlikely incubators of vital ideas about equality and justice.
John Perry Barlow and Robert Greenfield
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIn Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, a tender, scattershot memoir co-written with Robert Greenfield, the fact that Barlow, who died in February at 70, \'nearly became America’s first suicide bomber\' is presented as a (thankful) near miss in a remarkably \'Zelig-like life...\'It was a conservative impulse, but Barlow, in the grip of a breakdown, chose a radical solution. He figured that if he did something outrageous enough, people might \'take a hard look at where we were headed.\'...He mixed up 25 pounds of explosives in a plastic bag, encased it in ball bearings and duct tape, and drove to Cambridge, Mass. He planned to climb into the lap of the bronze statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard and blow himself up\' ... In the late 1980s, decades after Barlow almost blew himself up to stop civilization from coming unraveled, he developed an intimate friendship with that charming huckster Timothy Leary. At Beverly Hills cocktail parties, Leary always introduced his cowboy friend the same way: \'Here’s Barlow. He’s an American.\'
