Miles Harvey is the author of the national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps and the recipient of a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship. His book Painter in a Savage Land was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. He teaches at DePaul University.
"The King of Confidence is a ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable
read--a book with unsettling (but also weirdly comforting)
parallels to our time. By illuminating this forgotten moment in
American history, where a group of rational adults fell under the
spell of a charismatic madman, Harvey reminds us of the endlessly
repeating nature of history and humanity."--Dave Eggers, National
Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of
Zeitoun and What Is the What
"The King of Confidence is that rarest of gems: gorgeously written,
impeccably researched, and completely addictive. Miles Harvey has
written one of the best books of the year. But don't take my word
for it. Read it!"--Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author
of Ali: A Life and Luckiest Man Alive: The Life and Death of Lou
Gehrig
"A rollicking story ripe for a Hollywood treatment."--Vanity
Fair
"A spirited, entertaining read with a twist of insight and a tang
of scandal... Harvey has penned a tour de force of popular
history."--Library Journal
"Flip this book open, read page one, and then try to stop. The King
of Confidence is mesmerizing all the way through--a quirky,
rollicking ride through an America marked by upheaval, tumult, and
religious fervor. It feels like one of those dystopian futures that
Hollywood keeps warning us we're hurtling toward, but it's actually
our own forgotten past. What this startling book cleverly
illuminates, though, is our own perilous present, where so many of
us still yearn for con men and kings."--Dave Cullen, New York Times
bestselling author of Columbine
"Harvey delivers a vivid account of the life and times of American
sect leader, lawyer, newspaper editor, and con man James Jesse
Strang... He paints antebellum America as a time of 'excesses and
delusions' and skillfully explores the era's technological
advances, rising immigration, political violence, religious fervor,
and leading literary figures. This evocative tale will astonish and
delight fans of American history."--Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
"Harvey serves up what promises to be a page-turner about this
bizarre moment in Michigan history where fair Beaver Island served
as an epicenter of fraud, polygamy and piracy."--Jennifer Day,
Chicago Tribune
"Miles Harvey masterfully relates one of the great unknown chapters
of our nation's history, one of those peculiarly American tales
where faith, madness, and old-fashioned flimflammery converge to
stunning effect. The story of James Strang, con man extraordinaire,
is wildly amusing in its exposure of the stone-cold gullibility of
our forebears, but also unsettling in its eerie echoes of our
current national landscape, and the realization that very little
has changed. The King of Confidence is a marvelous read."--Scott
Anderson, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book
Critics Circle Award finalist Lawrence in Arabia
"Perfect for fans of Devil in the White City... Harvey's narrative
is a page-turning exercise in popular history... A nicely spun yarn
of religious chicanery on the frontier in a nearly forgotten
historical episode."--Kirkus Reviews
"The story of James Strang--a messianic con man who wreaks havoc on
an island community of his own devising--is amazing in itself. But
it is the telling of the tale--think Herman Melville meets Mark
Twain--that makes The King of Confidence a masterpiece. This book
has talons that sink into you and won't let go."--Nathaniel
Philbrick, New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the
Sea and Mayflower
"Vividly portrayed... Miles Harvey specializes in true stories of
audacious individuals, here attaining new heights of wonderment...
Writing with electrifying pleasure in discovery, Harvey zestfully
captures 'the carnivalesque atmosphere' of antebellum America...
Deftly performing a fresh and telling analysis of the timeless
power of the con man over Americans who worship those who invent
their own rules and 'their own truths, ' Harvey brings to galloping
life a forgotten, enlightening, and resounding chapter in America's
tumultuous history of searchers and charlatans."--Donna Seaman,
Booklist (starred review)
"Wooly and wild, as artful as scrimshaw, The King of Confidence
literally had me at the table of contents, and never let go. What
an immense pleasure to be in the hands of so deft a storyteller, to
be swept away by the richest kind of story, one that veers back to
a historical moment while capturing America today, our pixie-dust
delusions and national gullibility in the face of old-fashioned
hucksterism. Miles Harvey is a literary treasure; he's added his
best-yet to a growing heap of masterpieces."--Michael Paterniti,
New York Times bestselling author of The Telling Room and Driving
Mr. Albert
"The King of Confidence reads akin to the best of thriller fiction.
The true nature of the book renders the events all the more
shocking and makes for an impactful read. Miles Harvey has done a
masterful job bringing the past to life, narrating the whirlwind
rise and fall of a true confidence man."--City Book Review
"A jaunty, far-ranging history... Despite the frontier setting,
there is something eerily contemporary about Harvey's portrait of a
real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative
relationship to debt, and a genius for mass media... Harvey deploys
small scraps of knowledge to great effect. His account of Strang's
rise and fall is littered with thumbnail histories of
nineteenth-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the
Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper
exchanges, the Illuminati, and much else. This approach amounts to
a sort of historical pointillism, bringing the manic, skittering
mood of the era into focus. It is a style of history well suited to
the antebellum decades, when American culture was most unabashedly
itself... Harvey's wonderfully digressive narrative is interspersed
with news clippings, playbills, land surveys, and daguerreotypes,
as if to periodically certify that all of this madness is really
true... Rather than a biography of a single man, he offers a vivid
portrait of the time and place in which a character like Strang
could thrive."--Chris Jennings, New York Times Book Review
"A riveting tale told in lively prose and gripping anecdotes...
Harvey is a master storyteller, and his skills are in full
display."--Benjamin E. Park, Religion News Service
"Deeply researched, artfully written, and splendidly compelling...
Great writers deserve great subjects, and Miles Harvey, who has
proven himself a great writer in two previous books, has found
another subject worthy of his skills... A riveting book."--Rick
Kogan, Chicago Tribune
"Fascinating... Harvey, in a nonjudgmental style, sorts out reality
from myth when recounting Strang's bizarre life."--Bill Castanier,
Lansing City Pulse
"Harvery... is a remarkable sleuth, a writer with a passion for
maps and islands and the patience to tell a complicated
story."--Ann Fabian, National Book Review
"Harvey is a skillful writer and thoughtful researcher... He
examines the bedeviled society [of antebellum America] through the
life of James Jesse Strang, a strange man of many parts---most of
them bad."--Howard Schneider, Wall Street Journal
"Harvey's entertaining history... chronicles a manic, anxious,
gullible time, not unlike our own."--New York Times Book Review
"In this year of remote work and canceled vacation plans, the most
engrossing virtual trip I've embarked on transported me to a Mormon
kingdom on a Lake Michigan island during our nation's antebellum
era. And it's an outstandingly entertaining excursion." --Margaret
Fosmoe, Notre Dame Magazine
"Is James Strang the most infamous American con man you've never
heard of? That's the question animating Harvey's biography of the
opportunist prophet-king, a convert who persuaded the Mormons who
did not follow Brigham Young to Utah to join him on Michigan's
Beaver Island. Strang's authoritarian rule may have done him in,
but Harvey's marvelous rendering of this con man in fraught
antebellum America may have a particular resonance
today."--National Book Review
"James Strang is my new favorite ne'er-do-well of history: a con
artist for the centuries... Please read this book. It's the most
fun you'll ever have reading about the 1840s... Enjoy this wild
tale."--Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
"Miles Harvey's meticulously researched tale The King of Confidence
brings alive the bizarre and chaotic arc of Strang's life...
America's history is rich with tales of frauds and fakers who
successfully bamboozled their fellows. In Harvey's lively and
insightful book, he shows why Strang deserves to be remembered as a
prime exemplar of the type."--John Reinan, Minneapolis Star
Tribune
"Over several hundred exhaustively researched pages, Harvey
presents an account of Strang's life that plays out like a classic
narrative of ambition, transgression, success, and, ultimately,
failure."--Patrick Sullivan, Northern Express
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