Scams, a Michigan island and the con man who would be king
Great writers deserve great subjects and Miles Harvey, who has proven himself a great writer in two previous books, has found another subject worthy of his skills. His name was James Jesse Strang, a mid-19th century figure so famous in his time that his death made front-page headlines across the world before quickly fading into history.
Never heard of him? I am sure you haven’t. But I am also sure you will never forget him after reading Harvey’s deeply researched, artfully written and splendidly compelling new book, “The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch” (Little, Brown and Company).
Of Strang, Harvey writes that he was a man who “rose from obscurity to fame … (and) would come to embody a constantly repeating character in American history, a kind of figure whose grip on our collective imagination is as tight today as ever.”
Harvey has found interesting characters before, in “The Island of Lost Maps” (Random House, 2000), about Gilbert Joseph Bland Jr. who, in the latter decades of the 20th century, became the most prolific American map thief in history, and “Painter in a Savage Land” (Random House, 2008), focusing on Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European to capture in visual art North America in the 1500s. He has also worked over these last decades as an esteemed teacher at DePaul University, where he helped to start the school’s commendable Big Shoulders Books.
He first “met” Strang when while on a car ride around southeastern Wisconsin with his brother-in-law and hearing stories about the long-ago time Strang spent in the town of Burlington. He filed the name away until a few years later when a New York publisher serendipitously proposed the idea of a book on Strang. Harvey dove into