NP - PT Barnum Autobiography

[David Morris]

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/reconsiderations/hatching-monsters.php?page=all

The Life of P. T. Barnum is one of those curious historical artifacts:
the sociopathic memoir. Like Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull,
Confidence Man, or Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Barnum’s
memoir consists largely of anecdotes about tricks played upon an
individual or the public at large by a semihuman shape shifter. As a
consequence, Barnum was apolitical. He claimed to prize love, but
never represents it in his book. He was beyond all that.