Word: showmanly
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Barnum is one of the more honest characters in Jacobs' conflation of fact and fiction. In effect, the legendary showman leads a kind of geek chorus of real and imagined religious zealots, yellow journalists, gangsters and robber barons. The Wall Street rogue Jay Gould actually sells someone a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge. A Jewish peddler leaves the fold to become a dowser for parched anti-Semites. Hull changes the name of a new cigar from Pickaninny to Uncle Tom after hearing that black smokers might be offended...
...Pinkerton detective James McParland. Unable to extradite his prey legally from their Colorado headquarters, McParland abducted them, bundled them onto a train and ordered the tracks cleared all the way to Idaho. Such episodes of swashbuckling adventure bring out the crack reporter in Lukas as well as the showman, suggesting that what he relished about his story wasn't its intricate political subtleties but its moments of Wild West theatricality...
...quote Mae West ("Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself") and Woody Allen ("I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"), along with linguist Noam Chomsky, artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and, of course, Charles Darwin. Pinker has a showman's sense for knowing "when to hold his reader's attention with an illustration or a joke," observed University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley in the New York Times Book Review last week. "No other science writer makes me laugh so much...
...they were born in prudishness, sexploitation movies died in licentiousness. Porno films, which became chic in 1972, delivered the goods, up close and impersonal, without the showman's expert tease. And when home video arrived, gentlemen could take their vicarious pleasures in private. The community of sexploitation producers and audiences--suckers--was sundered forever...
...wanted to turn his novel Ragtime into a musical--agreed with him about the 1981 movie version: they both disliked it. He was impressed too that Drabinsky seemed to have read the book closely and thought about it deeply. "He's an interesting amalgam of old-time entrepreneurial showman and genuine theater enthusiast," says Doctorow. "He has real taste. And he's not afraid of ideas...