“Michael Daly vividly revives a rollicking pachydermal tale that riveted New Yorkers a century ago and still survives in a gruesome YouTube video. Daly . . . provides perceptive insights into circus and sideshow elephants and their huckster handlers . . . [and] leads readers on mesmerizing detours that reveal everything from the origins of pink lemonade to a brazen pickpocket’s trick. . . . Even [the] dark episode does not dampen the book’s exuberance. . . . A summery escape.”—New York Times
“[A] poignant, grim account of dueling impresarios and the American appetite for curiosities centered on one elephant’s life and death. . . . Topsy is a fascinating but disturbing story, a skillfully told and admirably researched reminder of a time not as long ago as we’d like to think.”—Wall Street Journal
“[Daly] invoke[s] these creatures . . . with grace and compassion.”—New York Times Book Review
“Heartbreaking.”—Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“A lively chronicle.”—Dallas Morning News
"A fascinating and moving piece of American history and a meditation on the cost of entertainment and human progress."—Kirkus Reviews
“Bizarre and remarkable . . . Daly’s fascinating, nuanced portraits of the seedy sides of the circus’s heyday and the dawn of the electric age makes for incredibly entertaining reading.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This book should be read by anyone who’s ever been to the circus. I read it and could not bring myself to put it down. Nor could I bring myself to look at the moment—preserved by Edison’s footage and now on YouTube—that this book illuminates so clearly. The story left me a little breathless, and I will never see an elephant in captivity again and not think about Topsy and the cruelty of which we humans are capable. I’ve always respected Michael Daly as a great New York writer. But here, he reaches out to the world beyond New York and goes deep. The results are extraordinary. He humanizes and speaks for those animals who cannot speak. He touches the hearts of those of us who are not animal activists. I’m not so proud to be a member of the human race today, but I am proud to know someone who should be.”—James McBride, author of The Color of Water
"Step right up, folks, and read all about it! The amazing tale of elephants, electricity, Edison and Barnum, stunts, fights and ghastly events. Topsy is a 19th-century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next."—Tom Brokaw
“Topsy offers a compelling history of late-nineteenth-century scientific genius, American hucksterism, and the chase for the almighty buck; it’s a tale of giants; Edison, Barnum, and an elephant, in which the four legged creature comes across as more humane than her fellow players”—Richard Price
“[A] tale of American enterprising spirit gone amok. . . the author’s quiet outrage . . . endows an off-the-radar circus story with the fatalistic gravitas of Aeschylus."—Boston Globe
“After seeing Thomas Edison’s 1903 film 'Electrocuting an Elephant,' author Michael Daly had to know more. The result is Topsy, a sad and fascinating story of a circus elephant at the turn of the last century, when America was flexing the new power of electricity. . . . While the tragic conclusion is known from the outset, the journey in Topsy offers continuous surprise.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Daly’s anecdotes will have readers laughing at the bad luck of the sometimes honest circus goers. . . . [and he] skillfully recreates several examples of animal brutality, the importance of the circus as one of the few affordable forms of entertainment, and the immoral actions of the leading characters.”—ForeWord
"Daly deftly weaves the story of one pachyderm's untimely end."—Barnes and Noble Review.com
“However tragic, Topsy is also a tale of determination, invention, and hope. Readers will come away with an understanding of aspects of American history that include un-sugarcoated descriptions of animal abuse, glories of the circus, and the emergence of electricity.”—Baltimore City Paper
“Daly expertly leads his readers through this peculiar series of events, as well as the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo—where McKinley was assassinated—and the development of Coney Island. Complete with letters, photographs and newspaper accounts from the period, Daly enlivens a captivating popular history of this exceptional time. A poignant read.”—Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“Fascinating . . . a heartbreaking, complex story of brutality.”—Workforce
Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison
Narrated by Mark Peckham
Michael DalyUnabridged — 11 hours, 16 minutes
Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison
Narrated by Mark Peckham
Michael DalyUnabridged — 11 hours, 16 minutes
Overview
In 1903 at the soon-to-open Luna Park on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted, likely with advice from Thomas Edison, whose film crew recorded the horrible event. Over the past century, this bizarre, ghoulish execution has reverberated through popular culture with the ring of an urban legend. But it really happened, and today, Edison's footage can be found on YouTube, where it has been viewed nearly two million times.
Many historical forces conspired to bring Topsy, Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together at Coney Island that day. Journalist Michael Daly's Topsy is a fascinating popular history that traces them, from the rise of the circus in America and the lives of circus elephants, through Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the war of the currents, to the birth of Coney Island.
Daly's book starts with the 1796 arrival of the first elephant to set foot in America. She was called simply the Elephant, and while her performance didn't go far beyond uncapping bottles of beer with her trunk and drinking, she drew large paying crowds up and down the Eastern Seaboard-so large, in fact, that her owners walked her from town to town in the dark to avoid anyone getting a free look.
Other elephants followed but essentially as solo curiosities. It wasn't until the years after the Civil War that the circus in America boomed, thanks especially to magnates P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh, who are major characters in Topsy. Their constant competition and efforts to outdo each other led Forepaugh to hatch an outlandish scheme in 1877. At an incredibly dynamic time in American history, with the country growing and immigration on the rise, Forepaugh understood that it was the first American-born child of an immigrant family that often offered a real anchor. So he smuggled in a baby elephant captured in the wild in Asia (most likely Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), and passed it off as a true American-the first elephant born in captivity. He said he wouldn't sell her for $20,000. Barnum, who had been offered the same elephant from a dealer in Hamburg, called his bluff, saying he'd pay $100,000 for an American-born baby.
This was just one of the battles in the war of the elephants. Forepaugh went big, billing one of his herd as the largest, so Barnum went bigger, importing an elephant from England named Jumbo. Barnum claimed he'd been hunting for an elusive “holy” white elephant for years, so Forepaugh simply painted one of his and concocted an exotic backstory that involved Thai royalty.
Rich in fantastic detail, Topsy brings to life the world of the circus, the caravans and sideshows, the astonishing athletic spectacles, and the crooks. Daly highlights the differences between Forepaugh and Barnum. The latter was the gold standard, a master showman and spinner of humbug whose circus was nevertheless known as the Sunday School Show. Forepaugh played to a rougher crowd and even traveled with his own team of pickpockets, who paid a sort of daily licensing fee to work the crowd. They even stole clothes from laundry lines while the people in small towns watched the circus parade. And all circuses resorted to “rat bills,” slanderous advertisements pasted along the routes. When one circus made use of electric lights to brightly illuminate the previously dim tents, another warned the public of the lighting's supposedly dire health risks.
Similar to the contrasting morals of the shows, elephant trainers had a striking dichotomy. Most resorted to horrible violence and cruelty to bend elephants to their will, to “tame” them. Occasionally, as happens later with Topsy, the elephants met violence with violence, killing trainers or breaking free, a
Editorial Reviews
09/15/2013
The 1903 public electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy forms the centerpiece of this sprawling audiobook, but Daly (The Book of Mychal) frequently digresses from Topsy's story to include chapters on the history of elephants in America and the travails of circus barons in the Gilded Age. Daly's captivating final chapters describe the "current wars" between electricity rivals George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison. Topsy was a victim of the rivalry, publicly executed to illustrate the supposed dangers of AC current. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes but somewhat unfocused. Narrator Mark Peckham's no-frills delivery presents the text and no more. VERDICT Recommended to fans of Gilded Age Americana or circus collections. ["Although this is a tale with a sad ending, popular history buffs will enjoy. Fans of Paul Chambers's Jumbo, about a Barnum elephant, or Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants will be drawn to this as well," read the review of the Atlantic Monthly hc, LJ 4/15/13.—Ed.]—Mark Swails, Johnson Cty. Community Coll., Overland Park, KS
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169551396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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