by Pope Brock

NEW! Available in TRADE PAPERBACK on JANUARY 13

Three Rivers Press (ppr)
and Crown Publishers (hc) / Random House
www.randomhouse.com
ISBN-13: 9780307339898
$14.95 Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-33988-1
ISBN-10: 0-307-33988-2
$24.95 Hardcover
Biography, American history
CHARLATAN was a Heartland Independent Bestseller in 2008!

Buy this book from your favorite locally owned and operated Midwest independent bookseller!  Click here for the directory of our member bookstores.

MBA Bookseller Information

Order through Random House or from wholesalers. If you have sales or publisher coop-related questions, please contact your Random House sales rep for assistance.

CHARLATAN is a great choice for reading groups, especially in its new trade paperback edition. And author Pope Brock may be available to do call-ins to your store’s book clubs and discussion groups. If you would like to set this up, please contact Jay Sones, Marketing Manager at Three Rivers Press . He will help make the arrangements with you. Jay’s contact information: jsones@randomhouse.com / (212) 572-4920.

NEW! MBA Booksellers: Earn up to $75 in rebates for promoting this book in paperback! See the marketing information and rebate form below.

Downloads

• Midwest Connections 2009 Rebate Form (PDF)
• Trade paperback book photo (JPG)
• Author Photo – Photo credit:Lynda Shenkman Curtis (JPG)
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials
• B&W print ad (PDF)
• Two-color quote sheet – great reviews for this book! (PDF)
• Two-color Q&A with author Pope Brock (PDF)
• New York Times review of CHARLATAN (PDF)
• Hardcover Book photo (JPG)

AND… here are some great electronic materials from author Pope Brock and from Crown that you can put up on your website!

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 — and here’s the link to Pope’s website — www.popebrock.com.

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. Here is the link for the small one – but you can get medium and large size as well. What it looks like: The book jacket is the widget. You can flip through pages of the book through that item.

How to do it: Go to to this web address and 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 was a MIDWEST CONNECTIONS PICK in 2008, and we are promoting it again in its trade paperback edition. This triumph of biography and American history is ready again 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.

Midwest Connections Marketing Plans

• NEW for the 2009 trade paperback edition! $75 in REBATES from MBA for display photos, ads, features in your newsletters, e-newsletters, and on your store website
• Author can be available for phoners with MBA bookstores and reading groups
• Banner ads for the book on the MBA website and MBA Bookstore Events website
• Display materials as PDF files provided by the publisher – just print out and use!
• Q&A with the author available as a PDF file – good for use with book clubs
• Print ad you can run in your local paper – earn a rebate from MBA for your ad! Ad available as a PDF file.
• Midwest Connections shelf-talkers, signs and stickers for in-store displays – earn a display rebate, too!
• Three Rivers Press marketing plans also include national print advertising, online and targeted radio campaigns, and author interviews.