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“... Shirley Hill of Dallas, partial to faking falls on pats of butter in restaurants; the nicely named Kenneth Arnold Parsley, maestro of supermarket tumbles on broken eggs and melted ice cream; the extraordinary ‘Mint Jelly’ Ridge, often found lying on the floor of a restaurant or hotel bathroom covered in blood and gashed, having slithered on a square-inch ...”

“... The history of publishing records no unlikelier-looking candidate for bestsellerdom. Written by a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana, it appeared in 1948 under the imprint of a medical textbook house, the W.B. Saunders Company of Philadelphia. Weighing three pounds, its 804 pages confronted readers with 162 tables and 173 graphs. Yet it flooded out in a first printing of 100,000 copies, excited more than five hundred articles and reviews, and was declared by Time magazine to be the greatest bookselling event since Gone with the Wind ...”

“... Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of Hemingway’s reading, and a monograph-length study of the creation of A Farewell to Arms, as well as three serial volumes of biography: The Young Hemingway (1986); Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989); and Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992 ...”

“... author was paid at the rate of $4 per 600-word page, perhaps $50 in all. One merit of Professor Silverman’s biography is that it is almost wholly factual, reminding us that to his contemporaries Poe was known and feared as a sharp, at times venomous critic, much less regarded as a poet and writer of stories in tune with the current fashion for Gothic ...”

“... we would like to read – and it is the phantom that continues to beckon biographers to his story. Kenneth Silverman has given the most complete and satisfying account to date in his Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (1991). Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic biography of 1933 (English translation, 1949), with an introduction by Sigmund ...”

“... of villains, you must remember that their originals are the even less plausible-sounding Sante, Kenneth and Kenny Kimes. If you think it a bit much to have them arrested on slavery charges and then carrying on as if nothing has happened, or to have their scams involve Gerald Ford and Pat Nixon, or to have the man who sells them illegal guns explain how to ...”

“... Cohen Moses, was a strong-willed woman like her own mother, the ‘flashingly imperious’ Rosalie Silverman Cohen. The Cohens were part of the German-Jewish elite that profited from mercantile enterprise, assimilated to secular enlightenment values and, two generations on, produced the likes of Walter Lippmann and J. Robert Oppenheimer – cultivated Jewish ...”