by Pope Brock

Crown Publishers/Random House
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-33988-1
ISBN-10: 0-307-33988-2
$24.95 Hardcover
Biography, American History

MBA Bookseller Information
Order through Random House or from wholesalers.  If you have questions about publisher newsletter coop for CHARLATAN, please contact your Random House sales rep for assistance. Earn up to $75 in rebates for promoting this book! See the marketing information and rebate form below.

All MBA bookstores have been sent reading copies of CHARLATAN, courtesy of Crown Publishers. Please send us your comments, reviews, and praise for this terrifically readable book. We’re eager to share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!

CHARLATAN is a great choice for reading groups! And author Pope Brock is available to do call-ins to your store’s book clubs and discussion groups. If you would like to set this up, please contact Donna Passannante, Marketing Director, Crown Publishing Group.

Downloads

• Midwest Connections Marketing info & Rebate Form (PDF)
• Two-color Publisher Catalog Page (PDF)
• Two-color Sign/Flyer (PDF)
• Two-color Quote Sheet (PDF)
• Two-color Q&A with Author (PDF)
• B&W Print Ad (PDF)
• Large B&W Print Ad (PDF)
• New York Times Review (PDF)
• Book Photo (JPG)
• Author Photo (JPG) Photo credit: Lynda Shenkman Curtis
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials

Materials from Author Pope Brock and Crown
Pope Brock says: “I have audio clips of the infamous Dr. Brinkley doing several of his radio talks in the 1930s, along with some other commercials and country music hijinks on his station. I think listening to them might help the reader or prospective reader get even more involved in the story.”  We agree. Visit his website for more information.

You can also embed the Crown Publishers/Random House “widget” for CHARLATAN as an excerpt if you wish. You just pick up this copy script and add it to your website. The book jacket is the widget. You can flip through pages of the book through that item. Click the plus sign (+) for the code to embed in your website.

About the Book

“CHARLATAN is an amazing story, incredibly told. Writer Pope Brock -actor; feature journalist for GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Life; and author of Indiana Gothic — is uniquely equipped to tell the story of one of the most bizarre and colorful characters to come out of Kansas. Meet John Brinkley, huckster extraordinary, the man who directly or indirectly helped bring both border radio and the AMA into existence.”
- Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS

“Told with uproarious brio…heavenly…A book so lively that its wild stories are virtually wall-to-wall.”
- Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“You will devour CHARLATAN, Pope Brock’s tale of fools and fanatics. With a vast and wild cast of characters, and filled with issues and topics that resonate through the years CHARLATAN begs comparison with Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and deserves to be a bestseller.”
- Chicago Tribune

“A rollicking biography—at turns funny and horrifying, brimming with wit, insight and who-knew facts…Brock’s prose is a joy to read, bold and colorful and a little irreverent…CHARLATAN reads like a novel—but no one could make this stuff up.”
- Wichita Eagle

CHARLATAN: AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HUCKSTER, THE MAN WHO PURSUED HIM, AND THE AGE OF FLIMFLAM by Pope Brock is a MIDWEST CONNECTIONS PICK starting in March. This brand new triumph of biography and American history is freshly published and ready to entice your customers with its “blend of reportage, social history, portraiture, and storytelling in the grand tradition.” (Ron Powers)

In 1917, having no medical training aside from years of selling worthless patent cures, “Dr.” John Brinkley opens a medical practice in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. Fifteen years later, he’s become America’s most famous surgeon, having pioneered an outlandish and highly dangerous method for restoring male virility.

It’s pure flimflam, of course, but this is the Age of Flimflam, when toxic snake-oil tonics sell under hundreds of brand names and traveling minstrel shows hawk bizarre machines that supposedly cure everything from cancer to the common cold.

Chicago firebrand intellectual Morris Fishbein, editor of a little-read publication called the Journal of the American Medical Association, has done more than anyone else in fighting this tidal wave of charlatanism, and he makes it his life’s mission to bring Brinkley down. Assisted by such luminaries as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, Fishbein launches offensive after offensive. Yet each time Fishbein closes a door, Brinkley opens a window, eventually becoming America’s most popular broadcaster so that he can plug his services on the radio. While murdering dozens of patients, he runs for governor of Kansas and nearly wins. Finally, his decades-long cat-and-mouse game with Fishbein culminates in a spellbinding trial.

CHARLATAN is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.

POPE BROCK is the author of Indiana Gothic, the story of the murder of his great-grandfather. He lives in upstate New York.