Barnum: An American Life
(Simon & Schuster, $28)
P.T. Barnum finally has the biography he deserves, said Rachel Shteir in The Wall Street Journal. The “staggeringly energetic” 19th-century impresario was “a bundle of contradictions,” so “it should not be surprising” that many contemporary portraits of him tend toward caricature. In the 2017 movie musical The Greatest Showman, the co-founder of America’s most famous circus was a champion of the marginalized, pulling them out of the closet and into the spotlight. Other chroniclers go to an opposite extreme, painting Barnum as a racist, an animal abuser, and a con artist—a personification of America at its worst. Robert Wilson’s portrait gives us instead an imperfect man who evolves for the better. “This P.T. Barnum may have been a small-hearted small-timer, but he grew into a humanist.”
“Over time, the author starts to feel like Barnum’s wingman,” said Jessica Bruder
in The New York Times. From the start, he casts the Connecticut-born huckster as a product of his times and an ever-resourceful self-made man. Raised by pranksters, Barnum proudly trafficked in winking humbuggery all his life, starting with a stunt that even Wilson doesn’t forgive: He bought or rented a blind, elderly slave and presented her as the 161-year-old former nursemaid of George Washington. When she died on tour in 1836, he sold tickets to her autopsy. If it’s true that Barnum later became a better man, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New