"Using history, real carny language, stories from former sideshow workers and owners, and from Nickell's own archives, Secrets of the Sideshows is a wealth of information for circus fans or anyone who's wondered how those seemingly-impossible illusions are created."
~Algona Upper Desmoines (IA), Brookings (SD) Register, Lake Country (WI), Marco I
Using history, real carny language, stories from former sideshow workers and owners, and from Nickell's own archives, Secrets of the Sideshows is a wealth of information for circus fans or anyone who's wondered how those seemingly-impossible illusions are created.
~Brookings (SD) Register
"Nickell offers first a history of sideshows... then presents a comprehensive analysis of sideshow performers, skills, and illusions.... Recommended."
~Choice
An illustrated book for large popular-culture collections. Recommended for all levels.
~Choice
"To find out how it's done, and other carnival minutiae, browse Nickell's comprehensive Secrets of the Sideshows."
~Entertainment Weekly
"A widely researched and splendidly illustrated history of the bizarre world of the exhibited abnormal and the demonstrated impossible."
~Foreword Magazine
If there's a more incredibly thorough or more thoroughly incredible bookout there on the past, present and future of the midway, I don't know it. Blessed are all we rubes that Joe Nickell's Secrets of the Sideshows is outin the world.
~James Taylor, author of James Taylor's Shocked and Amazed: On & Off theMidw
A book that gives you the straight lowdown on the acts and the people behindthem. A clear-eyed look into a vanishing bit of Americana. Intriguing andunique.
~Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award winning author of The Bottoms and Freezer Burn
The author, lifting up the back flap of the tent show, reveals, informs, and presents a range of human oddities from the 'real' to the 'created.'
~Linking Ring
Ever since I saw Penn and Teller 'eat' fire and pontificate on the circus sideshow, I have been curious to learn more about it, not only the history and culture of the sideshow, but the secrets themselves! Nickell delivers brilliantly.
~Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things
Simultaneously provides an insider's glimpse of that world on the skirts of the main event and an excursion into a vanishing feature of North American life.
~PsycCritiques
An enjoyable read.... Nickell has encyclopedic knowledge of sideshow history
~Roanoke (VA) Times
Nickell takes us inside the world of fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, jugglers, snake-handlers, and magicians to explain the illusions and oddities we may have puzzled over but never fully understood.
~Robert A. Baker, author of They Call It Hypnosis
To be sure, he gives plenty of secrets away here, most of them open secrets, but the book works best as a tribute to the imagination of the performers and organizers of the exhibits which were meant to provoke and satisfy that admirable old human characteristic, curiosity.... If you want the lowdown on sideshows, step right up, ladies and gentlemen, Joe Nickell presents the best show on the midway.
~Times of Acadiana
An exciting experience of the mostly American phenomenon of carnys, sideshows, freaks, and carnivals.
~UFO Aktuellt
For an entertaining book on a rapidly fading culture that was once a thriving part of old America, be sure and pick up "The Secret of the Sideshows."
~Jarrid Deaton, The Floyd County Times
