"Charlatan" by Pope Brock

[terrya]

I just finished this wonderfully entertaining book this week (I checked it out at the Library).

This is an excerpt from the New York Times review.

Related
An Excerpt From 'Charlatan' (randomhouse.com)

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Then both farmer and doctor gazed out the office window. They spied livestock. And they experienced a shared brainstorm. Supposedly at his patient’s urging, Brinkley agreed to try to restore the man’s virility via an unorthodox transplant operation. The farmer wound up with two extra testicles courtesy of one luckless goat.

For Dr. Brinkley, whose story is told with uproarious brio in Pope Brock’s heavenly “Charlatan,” this 1917 epiphany was the beginning of a mercenary miracle. “Dimly he had begun to realize that he was gifted beyond the run of doctors,” Brinkley’s adoring authorized biography would one day explain. That book would also credit Brinkley with “this lovable characteristic of genius, that money is not an aim, or an end in itself, but a means of enlarging the central idea of his life-work.”

Selflessly or otherwise, Brinkley parlayed his goat-gland breakthrough into a unique place in American history. He was much more than just a mere medical quack. In a book so lively that its wild stories are virtually wall-to-wall, Mr. Brock describes early-20th-century America’s endlessly credulous populace, with “the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad.” Brinkley and his virility scheme tapped into the nation’s penchant for mumbo-jumbo and hence into opportunities for salesmanship that had been previously unknown.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/books/31maslin.html

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Saw that in the bookstore. Want! :) nt