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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
True crime

CHARLATAN

Pope Brock

America's Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man who pursued him, The Age of Flimflam

In 1917, John R. BrinkleyAmerica's most brazen con manintroduced 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 menand 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. 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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Book Published 2023-10-10 by Crown

Comments

One of New York Times critic Janet Maslin's Ten Favorite Books of 2008: "Told with uproarious brio.heavenly.A book so lively its wild stories are virtually wall-to-wall." Read more...

Wonderful American social history and lots of fun.

Rollicking, funny, brilliantly readable.

Hugely amusing [but also] dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance.

UK: Orion

An extraordinary saga of the most dangerous quack of all time.entrancing.

Written with glee, in a style that is pure gusto, a bubbling fountain of metaphor and arresting image.Fishbein's campaign against Brinkley makes up one strand of this extraordinary tale and provides a bravura courtroom finale.

Matt Damon to Star as Con-Man Doctor in 'Charlatan': After headlining two movies that debuted on the fall festival circuit "Suburbicon" and "Downsizing" Matt Damon has found a new project. He's set to star as John R. Brinkley, a real-life 20th century doctor who conned his patients into thinking that he had discovered the cure to impotence, in the drama "Charlatan," Variety has learned. Read more...

You will devour Charlatan..

Superbly crafted and enthralling.

If Hollywood hasn't already optioned Pope Brock's "Charlatan," an account of the rise and fall of the all-American quack "Dr." John R. Brinkley, what's keeping it?