Secrets of the Sideshows by Joe Nickell, University Press of Kentucky, 2005, 401 pages, $32.95

Reviewed by Joel A. Moskowitz, M.D

Barnum was incorrect.   His statistics are wrong.  It is not that "there is a sucker born every minute."  Virtually everyone born is wired to believe the unbelievable, to thirst for the weird, the bizarre, and the monstrous.  Our inner anxieties simultaneously draw us to that which frightens us: strange appearances, nature's mistakes, and medical anomalies.  Even those who protest an aversion to seeing a two headed goat or the bearded woman are vulnerable to a spectrum of fascinations which includes slowing down to peer at the victims of an injury crash or the
disfigured survivors of a burn.  We, and that is all of us not just the sucker born every minute, peer and are repulsed at the very same time.

This mental struggle with the vagaries of our existence and how matters may go awry has links to myth, superstition, religion, medicine and magic.

The sideshow of yesteryear where persons clutching their loved ones and families could, in a socially acceptable way, view those unfortunates where mother nature's plans were corrupted, producing the too short, dwarfs, too tall, giants, humans with extra digits and those with none at
all we may think is less in evidence in our modern and scientific times. Not at all. Go to underdeveloped countries where birth care and nutrition is lacking, where sexual unions are family affairs, where those unfortunate poor cannot readily obtain plastic or orthopedic surgery or
medicine for their hideous disfigurements and where they are obliged to beg on the streets and you may be shocked that the sideshow is on the main street.  

In 'first world societies' inquiry from the prurient to the intellectual has become transmuted into the guise of scientific investigation of these errors of medical anomalies or, for example, those
whose life's work is dedicated  to 'fix' nature's mistakes i.e. separating twins conjoined at the head etc.

Joe Nickell, magician and investigator has written a scholarly book. Lifting up the back flap of the tent show, he reveals, informs, and presents a range of human oddities from the 'real' to the 'created' (read 'fake') Mr. Nickell is senior research fellow of the Committee of Scientific Enquiry
of Claims of the Paranormal—an organization for which I serve as a Scientific Consultant. 

Mankind is a frightened folk.  Life is so brittle and marvelous.  In primitive cultures, which sadly exist today, throngs cheer a beheading or a hanging.  The stage magician dismembers an audience volunteer (and restores the severed hand instantly), cuts his female assistant into multiple sections, randomizes the parts and re-synthesizes the woman to appreciative applause.  Secrets of the Sideshows may be mistaken for a history of past popular culture but this writer suggests, is as active today albeit in the guise of the conjurer, the physician, the clergy, the purveyor of quackery, and psychics and even those of the media, for many of whom, dramatic disasters are news.  People want to hear, read, and 'learn' about the catastrophes and curiosities of life's adventures.

Magicians need this well written tome in their library.  Those fortunate enough to have enjoyed Al Flosso, the Coney Island Fakir, will pleasure in the memory of this sideshow style wizard.  Harry Anderson penetrating his arm with a long needle, fire and sword eaters, and those who pound nails into their head through their nostrils are variants of sideshow 'working acts'.  Bizarre magic is today's subspecialty where theater audiences can 'work through' their fears while seeing the performer tear the head off aduck and 'glue' it back again.   It is reassuring to know that no matter what the insult, we can survive.

Some may criticize Secrets of the Sideshows because they feel it discloses deceptions used by conjurers today.  Penn and Teller have made an art form of 'revealing' secrets, which has only heightened audience amazement.  Others may fault Secrets of Sideshows as being too
encyclopedic while at the same time asserting that most of this data has been described elsewhere.  This inherent fallacious internally contradictory argument is its own rebuttal.

Ray Hyman, a friend of mine, and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University of Oregon agrees (with me) that humans have evolved to be a credulous species.  Dependant on social groups for their survival; these groups tend to share beliefs.  Even, I would attempt to persuade, whenthose beliefs are harmful, incorrect and even dangerous.  H. L. Mencken writing in the Baltimore Sun, June 4, 1923 opined, "No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capableof reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence."    It is
this writer's thesis, as a trained psychiatrist, that each of us struggles with inner fears which perforce makes us vulnerable to the mysterious, the magical and those who, with evil intent or there owninability to be rational seek to capitalize on our anxieties.  The Secrets of the Sideshows by Nickell is a thinking person's text.

Nickell seeks to shine knowledge on the history of these demonstrations of oddities, illusions, aberrations of human development, impossible abuses of the human organism ("swallow swords and fire, lying on beds of nails while being pounded, escaping traumas which, one would expect, would sever limbs, or  lead to decapitation").   By being, himself, a magic pitchman in a carnival and obtaining a backstage view of the devices of deception. he shares his fascination not to approve but to enlighten.

Regrettably, it is our unconscious need that makes us susceptible to these carny talkers.   As pervasive as is the tendency to be gullible, it is remarkable that the word 'gullible' does not appear in any dictionaryor encyclopedia.  Check it out! When you discover that I have sent you on a wild goose chase, rush quickly to your local bookstore to buy a copy of Secrets of the Sideshows.