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Les Bodnar is a respected orthopedic surgeon and former physician for the Notre Dame football team. His memoir, however, is from an era long before that fame, when he was 12 and 13, and a part of his father’s carnival. The romance of carnival life, of escaping the 9-5 doldrums and somehow recapturing yourself, is there, but so too the hard work and trials, the difficulty of putting on a show day after day and week after week for people who both love the show and are apprehensive of the people who put it on. 
     The year is 1928, and the Boom is booming in our great cities, but life in the small towns in the Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin remains tenuous. Bodnar writes about putting the show together, handling the sometimes-unpredictable people who perform and run the games, holding on to the core that made the carnival that expectant joy for kids everywhere and of all ages. It’s a world filled with shills and cons, freak shows (some of them real) and rides galore, trust given to unlikely characters and the security of family, above all family, despite all the absences and hardships. 
 In the background the coming end of the Boom whispers, and soon the country will plunge into what will be called in America “the Great Depression.” It is not the innocence experienced before the Great War. Childhood had witnessed something too unspeakable and horrific to write about then; it demanded poetry. We hunkered down within our own, and did our best to forget, and only occasionally, as when Bodnar witnessed a Ku Klux Klan rally, did the ugliness that can be the world intrude on our sensibilities, and the reader finds himself or herself sharing this street-smart innocence of a never-to-return era.
     Complete with period photographs, a lexicon, a bibliography, and a look at the way carnivals operate to this day, Carnie will inform, charm, and perhaps edify.
 

During the 1920s and ’30s, Franz Taibosh—whose stage name was Clicko—performed in front of millions as one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Prior to his fame in the United States, Taibosh toured the world as the “Wild Dancing Bushman,” showing off his frenzied dance moves in freak shows, sideshows, and music halls from Australia to Cuba. When he died in 1940, the New York Times called him “the only African bushman ever exhibited in this country.” In Clicko, Neil Parsons unearths the untold story of Taibosh’s journey from boyhood on a small farm in South Africa to top billing as one of the travelling World’s Fair Freaks.

Through Taibosh’s tale, Parsons brings to life the bizarre golden age of entertainment as well as the role that the dubious new science of race played in it. Beginning with Taibosh’s early life, Clicko untangles the real story of his ancestry from the web of myths spun around him on his rise to international stardom. Parsons then chronicles the unhappy middle period of Taibosh’s career, when he suffered under the heel of a vicious manager. Left to freeze and nearly starve in an unheated apartment, Taibosh was rescued by Frank Cook, Barnum & Bailey’s lawyer. The Cooks adopted Taibosh as a member of their family of circus managers and performers, and his happy—if far from average—years with them make up the final chapter of this remarkable story.

Equal parts entertaining and disturbing, Clicko vividly evokes a forgotten era when vaudeville drew massive crowds and circus freaks were featured in Billboard and Variety. Parsons introduces us to colorful characters such as George Auger the giant and the original Zip the Pinhead, but above all, he gives us an unforgettable portrait of Franz Taibosh, rescued at last from the racists and the romantics and revealed here as an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.