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Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison, by Michael Daly
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In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted, and over the past century, this bizarre, ghoulish execution has reverberated through popular culture with the whiff of urban legend. But it really happened, and many historical forces conspired to bring Topsy, Thomas Edison, and those 6600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy The Startling Story of the Crooked Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book on this astonishing tale.
At the turn of the century, the circus in America was at its apex with the circuses of P.T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh (or 4-Paw) competing in a War of the Elephants, with declarations of whose pachyderms were younger, bigger, or more “sacred”. This brought Topsy to America, fraudulently billed as the first native-born, and caught between the circus disputes and the War of the Currents, in which Edison and George Westinghouse (and Nikola Tesla) battled over alternating versus direct current.
Rich in period Americana, and full of circus tidbits and larger than life characters—both human and elephant—Topsy is a touching tale and an entertaining read.
- Sales Rank: #390570 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-07-02
- Released on: 2013-07-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Cruelty to animals was considered entertaining by many people in nineteenth-century America. At a time when cockfighting was widespread, and draymen beating horses on city streets was common, mobs greeted traveling circuses to gawk at exotic beasts. No animals suffered more than elephants, chained together on display, vulnerable to tormentors offering peppered apples and whiskey. Elephant keepers, many of whom were ill-paid alcoholics, could be just as abusive, using sharp hooks instead of kind words to control their charges. As circus owners P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh touted their increasingly larger herds of elephants, sensational newspapers reported on a series of accidental deaths of their keepers. The elephants were always blamed. Weaving together stories about circus rivalries and the contest between power companies to wire America, Daly recounts how a once-beloved baby elephant grew up to be condemned to a public execution using electricity, the technical innovation of the time. Not for sensitive readers. --Rick Roche
Review
“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
“A gripping popular history . . . Vivid . . . simultaneously fascinating and horrifying."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“[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
About the Author
MICHAEL DALY has been a newspaper journalist and columnist for many years, currently with the New York Daily News. He is the author of The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge about his friend, an NYFD chaplain who died on 9/11. In 2002, Daly was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He lives in Brooklyn.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
The electrifying story of elephants in America
By Brooklynbookworm
I knew about Topsy, the elephant who met a sad end at Coney Island. What I didn't know before reading this book was the incredible history of elephants in America and how it intersected with the equally amazing story of old-time circuses and, surprisingly, a fierce rivalry between the fathers of modern electricity. Meticulously researched and grippingly told, this book is full of indelible characters -- most of all, the elephants themselves.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A sad history of animal cruelty
By JYK
It was difficult to get through this book, because the author did such a good job vividly portraying the human arrogance and cruelty toward elephants, which are intelligent, empathetic animals. It broke my heart as they were torn from their mothers as calves and "trained" through beatings and deprivation. What makes me sadder is the uncomfortable thought that we still may not have learned to be better one hundred-plus years later. We still have instances of confining intelligent animals - whether they be elephants, orcas, or apes - in the name of profit or scientific research. This is a well-written book that makes us ponder whether we truly have progressed as human beings.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Topsy
By csutherlan
A better title would have been something about how captive elephants have given their all to make the circus what it is, today. The book is not about Topsy, only, so the title was a little misleading for me. The circus, the competition between circus owners to acquire elephants, the general acquiring of elephants, and the story of Topsy make up the full book. The first chapter is a little wanting with page, after page, after page, after page after page . . of the phrase "would have" to describe how Topsy "would have" been born and captured. After Chapter 1, the book is interesting. I finished reading it, but felt the book could have been more aptly titled about circus elephants in general. The story of Topsy is the capper, but there were just as many other interesting stories in the book about other captive elephants. A good read and a book that should be on the list for anyone unaware of the treatment of captive elephants, and also, the chosen methods by circuses to put some of these elephants, not just Topsy, to death, those deemed to have become psychotic due to capture or dangerous amongst humans (becoming so due to the mistreatment of the elephants by their trainers, such as with Topsy). You'll learn more about circus elephants in this book, than you would from Wikipedia.
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