Here are 39 books that Ward Hall - King of the Sideshow! fans have personally recommended if you like
Ward Hall - King of the Sideshow!.
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Everyone knows what it’s like to be the “odd man out”—the despair of being shunned or isolated or ridiculed by the “crowd.” For some, it can last their whole life. I’ve always been curious as to why this occurs, both from the side of those “pointing” and from that of the recipient. Strangeness attracts us by its very uniqueness, and to me, that’s something to be celebrated and marveled over. To some, it is also feared.
There’s a reason this book is a classic. I read it a number of years ago and reread it last year—it holds up exceedingly well.
The author’s depiction of the parents who take drugs with the intention of having malformed children they can showcase is a great setup, but it’s the character of Arturo the Aquaboy, in all his grandiosity, power, and neediness, that is compelling and resonates so today.
A National Book Award Finalist: This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias have bred their own exhibit of human oddities. (The New York Times Book Review)
The Binewskis arex a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan, Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins, albino hunchback Oly, and…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Everyone knows what it’s like to be the “odd man out”—the despair of being shunned or isolated or ridiculed by the “crowd.” For some, it can last their whole life. I’ve always been curious as to why this occurs, both from the side of those “pointing” and from that of the recipient. Strangeness attracts us by its very uniqueness, and to me, that’s something to be celebrated and marveled over. To some, it is also feared.
Part and parcel of being different and strange is perhaps being otherworldly. Emma Donaghue’s book, like her other books I’ve read, is a propulsive page-turner that also makes you think.
Is eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who is said to have eaten nothing for months but appears to be thriving miraculously, a fraud? The question probes deep into our view of the miraculous, including religious conundrums that have always intrigued me: would there be Christ without miracles? Do we treasure and fear what we simply don’t understand?
Set in the author’s homeland of Ireland, this is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives in a setting defined by a people intimate with hunger.
Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle—a girl said to have survived without food for months—and soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life.
Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired…
Everyone knows what it’s like to be the “odd man out”—the despair of being shunned or isolated or ridiculed by the “crowd.” For some, it can last their whole life. I’ve always been curious as to why this occurs, both from the side of those “pointing” and from that of the recipient. Strangeness attracts us by its very uniqueness, and to me, that’s something to be celebrated and marveled over. To some, it is also feared.
There’s something about the grittiness of turn-of-the-century New York that seems especially well-suited to the different and strange, including the depictions in this novel of the Coney Island seashore, the tenements of the Lower East Side, and a brutal asylum.
The characters include a “night-soiler” cleaning out tenement privies, an undertaker’s wife, and estranged twin sisters, and the way their stories weave together is a Dickens-esque plot full of intrigue, deception, heroism, and forgiveness. Over it all is a sense of magic and possibility, including people who aren’t who or what they claim to be.
'A SKILLFUL TRIUMPH' Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist - 'IRRESISTIBLE' Emma Donoghue, author of Room
New York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan Threadgill, a young night soiler who cleans out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an abandoned newborn baby. An orphan himself, Sylvan was raised by a kindly Italian family and can't bring himself to leave the baby in the slop. He tucks her into his chest, resolving to find out where she belongs.
Odile Church is the girl-on-the-wheel, a second-fiddle act in a…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Everyone knows what it’s like to be the “odd man out”—the despair of being shunned or isolated or ridiculed by the “crowd.” For some, it can last their whole life. I’ve always been curious as to why this occurs, both from the side of those “pointing” and from that of the recipient. Strangeness attracts us by its very uniqueness, and to me, that’s something to be celebrated and marveled over. To some, it is also feared.
This book strikes that perfect tone that hits oddness and singularity on the head, with a bit of spirituality thrown in. When a genderless, racially ambiguous person is found on a church pew (and thus called “Pew” by the parishioners), what is one to think?
Lacey expertly leads us through others’ reactions to the stranger: at first, confiding and confessing their fears, then becoming more menacing. It’s the perfect juxtaposition of what so many of us tend to do when experiencing someone who is different: projecting ourselves and our dreams and fears onto her or him or them.
WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020.
“The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.
Published in 2002, I love this book for its personal interviews with performers and showmen from the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a chance to not just read about sideshow history, but to hear it straight from the mouths of such people like Jeanie Tomaini the Half Girl, Melvin Burkhart the Anatomical Wonder, and impresarios Ward Hall and Bobby Reynolds.
Plus, it’s filled with plenty of extraordinary photos.
Looks at carnivals and circus midways, focusing on a variety of sideshow performers, including Melvin Burkhart, the Human Blockhead; Percilla the Monkey Girl and her husband Emmitt the Alligator Man; and Mortado, the Human Fountain.
I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.
This is the story of Michael Costello, known as the Amazing Blondini. But for someone who could swallow swords, pull cars with his teeth and have one drive over his head, eat fire and razor blades, and have men stand on him while he lay on a bed of nails, “amazing” hardly did him justice.
I love how this biography takes us through his incredibly unusual life journey that began when he was born into a circus family on a fairground in Dublin in 1922 and eventually began learning stunts through the mentorship of a variety of colorful characters. As he grew more skilled, he grew more daring—all for the sake of entertaining audiences and shocking them in entirely new ways.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.
This is one of the first books about sideshow performers that I (Marc) bought more than 25 years ago. It’s filled with remarkable stories and images of many of the most famous performers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Among them is the tale of Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged woman. After reading about Corbin, I began telling friends at a party her story, and a woman listening in said she knew about her. I couldn’t believe it. That woman later became my wife.
History. Cultural studies. Another long out-of-print classic book based on Mannix's personal acquaintence with sideshow stars such as the Alligator Man and the Monkey Woman, etc. Read all about the notorious love affairs of midgets; the amazing story of the elephant boy; the unusual amours of Jolly Daisy, the fat woman; the famous pinhead who inspired Verdi's RIGOLETTO; the tragedy of Betty Lou Williams and her parasitic twin; the black midget, only 34 inches tall, who was happily married to a 264-pound wife; the human torso who could sew, crochet and type; and bizarre accounts of normal humans turned into…
I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.
Drimmer’s 1973 book was another of my (Marc) first sideshow books. It’s packed with amazing stories about truly amazing people, and that’s what I love reading about—all the incredible things people could do despite their various anomalies.
This book may have been the first place I read about legless acrobat Eli Bowen and armless wonder Charles Tripp organizing a tandem bicycle ride—one steering, the other peddling. True teamwork. Dan and I later re-created the photo with a modern-day armless man and a legless man.
I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.
Those who made an impression on Houdini were clearly doing something extraordinary. In 1920’s Miracle Mongers, Houdini shares the stories of unique performers from history along with those he encountered personally, like Evatima Tardo, the woman whose act involved getting bitten by poisonous snakes and living to do it over and over again.
He also describes acts involving fire breathing, stone eating, sword swallowing, and more. Like the acts themselves, his takes on them are fascinating.
The legendary magician and illusionist Harry Houdini turns a critical eye to the astonishing claims of those in his own profession. Using personal research and observations, Houdini reveals the cunning techniques employed by fire-eaters, sword swallowers, and other masters of deception to mystify and amaze audiences around the world. This classic skeptical work explores and exposes the methods of such "wonders" as "The Incombustible Spaniard," "Defiers of Poisonous Reptiles," and many others. Originally published in the 1920s, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods scrupulously examines the direct predecessors of modern psychics and mentalists."My professional life has been a constant record of…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I remember reading Enid Blyton’s Mr. Galliano’s Circus as a child and was fascinated more by the idea of circus life than the actual performance aspect. I still adore watching high-quality circus feats performed by acrobats and love that frisson of excitement as everyone shuffles into their seats just before showtime. When I began writing children’s books, my aim was to give the child characters room to develop resilience and courage while encountering danger and adventure without the presence of adults. In order to do this, I had to somehow remove parental figures. Running away is the perfect literary device to achieve this which is how Glass Dreams came about.
This book is part of the Hetty Feather collection, perfect for fans of this feisty Victorian heroine.
Recounted by ‘Diamond’ (formerly Ellen-Jane), the child acrobatic wonder, this is a story about running away FROM the circus. Bought for five guineas by cruel clown Beppo, Diamond is forced to become part of the Silver Brothers’ tumbling act at Tanglefield’s Travelling Circus. Although competent, she is mistreated and unhappy, but when Hetty Feather joins the circus as ringmaster ‘Emerald’, things begin to change…
Diamond wasn't always a star. Born to penniless parents who longed for a strong, healthy son, she was a dainty, delicate daughter - and a bitter disappointment.
Discovering an extraordinary gift for acrobatics, Diamond uses her talent to earn a few pennies, but brings shame on her family. When a mysterious, cruel-eyed stranger spots her performing, Diamond is sold - and is taken to become an acrobat at Tanglefield's Travelling Circus.
The crowds adore Diamond, but life behind the velvet curtains is far from glamorous. Her wicked master forces Diamond to attempt ever more daring tricks, until she is terrified…
