Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

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Crown, Feb 5, 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages
The inspiration for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival documentary, NUTS!. “An extraordinary saga of the most dangerous quack of all time...entrancing” –USA Today

In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen con man–introduced an outlandish surgical method for restoring fading male virility.

It was all nonsense, but thousands of eager customers quickly made “Dr.” Brinkley one of America’s richest men–and a national celebrity. The great quack buster Morris Fishbein vowed to put the country’ s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business, yet each effort seemed only to spur Brinkley to new heights of ingenuity, and the worlds of advertising, broadcasting, and politics soon proved to be equally fertile grounds for his potent brand of flimflam.

Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America ripe for the bamboozling.
 

Contents

Epigraph Prologue
Chapter 21
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 5
Chapter 7
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 20
Chapter 24
Chapter 28
Chapter 31
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 37
Chapter 39

Chapter 12
Chapter 14
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 40
Chapter 42
Chapter 45
Chapter 49

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About the author (2008)

POPE BROCK has written for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. Brock is the author of the critically acclaimed Indiana Gothic, the story of his great-grandfather’s murder in 1908. He lives in upstate New York with his twin daughters, Molly and Hannah.

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