While England is known for their eccentrics, America has a crop of amazingly odd people who who lived large, were well-known in their time, but have faded into obscurity. One book that I greatly enjoyed was about Alfred Lawson. He was a professional baseball player at the inception of baseball, then got into planes and coined the term ‘aircraft’, then moved on during the depression to create the ‘Direct Credits’ movement – a harebrained attempt at a new financial system with parades and floats, then invented his own pseudo-religion called ‘Lawsonomy’.
This only scratches the surface of this man. There is one flawed scholarly work on him called ‘zig-Zag and swirl’ – it’s very hard to find but the only historical record of a tireless kook.
Other great kooks: Bernarr Mcfaffen, Horace fletcher, John Harvey Kellogg, Howard hughes to name a few.
Anyone have recommendations for biographies of kooks famous in their time but mostly forgotten. These are amazing people who dreamed big and executed on their dreams but were batshit crazy by most measures. I find their inventiveness, persistence and eccentricities to display the extent of the human mind to achieve fame in their time and persuade many people to follow them.
It’s a niche interest and the book are hard to find.
by ETBiggs
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First book that comes to my mind was *The Catcher is a Spy* by Nicholas Dawidoff, which tells the story of Mo Berg, a light-hitting catcher for two decades who happened to be a genius with a Princeton degree and worked for the OSS (CIA precursor).
Another is *The Prodigy*, the sad story of William Sidis, a man with an astronomical IQ who never found a comfortable niche in society. He went to Harvard in his early teens.