Olof the Eskimo Lady: A Biography of an Icelandic Dwarf in America
Автор:
Inga Dora Bjornsdottir, 248 стр., ISBN:
0472117262
Olof Krarer may be one of America's most effective impostors of the twentieth century. Born in Iceland in 1858, she moved to the United States at age nineteen. Because she was a dwarf, the only job she could get was as the "wife" in a dwarf couple at a circus. It wasn't long before she fabricated a new life for herself, as an Inuit Eskimo from Greenland. It's estimated that Krarer gave more than 2,500 lectures around the country, including talks at universities, on life in Greenland as an Eskimo. Nearly all the information she gave was made up, uninformed, and just plain wrong, but no one, from William Jennings Bryan to Robert Peary, ever disputed her facts. Americans at the time were intensely interested in life in the far North, thanks in part to the first attempts to reach the North Pole. Bjornsdottir puts Krarer in that context and explains how dramatic improvements in railroad transportation and an extreme shortage of entertainment helped drive her popularity. She also describes...
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