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Rating: 
Summary: What more can I say...
Review: All the reviews have hit this book on the head. What more can I say? However I do have a request. Several years ago PBS ran a lengthy television show where Ricky brought his book to the stage. As Master of Ceremonies he introduced people who today keep these arcane performances alive. It was a terrific show. Has anyone run across a tape of this program? I'm amazed PBS has not made it available on their on-line store. If anyone has any information please let me know.
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Summary: Ricky Jay, Master Magician, Master Writer
Review: As a magician and card wielder Ricky Jay is fascinating to watch as well as listen to. As a writer Mr. Jay also brings his own fascination at the work of others to play and writes a truly well-written, very interesting and enlightening book about the arcane world of many sometimes downright odd entertainers. Thorough in his presentation of details Mr. Jay's book is well-researched and his appreciation and awe for these unique people makes us quite enthralled as we read page after page about performers such as Le Petomaine, with his unusual ability to produce sounds of musical quality from a most unusual source on his body. Ricky Jay, besides being fascinating to watch, is also fascinating to read.
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Summary: Not quite odd enough
Review: I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something here, but this book is not nearly as marvelous as everyone claims. The entertainers profiled are not nearly as odd as claimed. The guy who could produce any scrap of paper named by the audience? The guy who could maneuver a ball up a ramp while curled within? The man who stretches his body a few inches? They sound interesting, but there's not much more to the book than is evident in the sentences you just read. Jay seems to have done his research through advertising and printed materials, rather than first-person sources, and this means his stories rely on conjecture where there should be depth and soul.
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Summary: Ricky Jay is having a lot of freaky fun
Review: In Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, Ricky Jay takes on the history of oddball performers: men who claimed to cram their entire bodies into quart jars, armless ladies who could paint miniatures holding a brush between their teeth, gentlemen whose specialty was to enter large ovens accompanied by raw meat and exit (unharmed) with fully-cooked steaks, as well as mind readers of all sorts and species (human, pig, and horse). Organized into chapters by skill by oddball skill, Jay is sometimes able to document such performers back into the 1700s by tracking newspaper reports, handbills, etc., many of which are reproduced in color plates and black-and-white photographs. Ricky Jay occupies an engaging hole in intellectual space between enthusiast and academic. He is comprehensive in the extreme, but his writing style is anecdotal and he does not go for any elaborate sociological explanation of why such performers exist or what they 'mean' to society. He just wants you to have fun, and perhaps to freak you out just a wee bit. The book is also very nicely designed; its large wide pages lie flat and there are loads of remarkable illustrations. Definitely worth a look!
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Summary: A classic in weird
Review: Loaded with photos and Mr. Jay's learned commentary, this book must be the best of it's kind, a celebration of what individuals can do, even under the toughest of circumstances. Yes, some of these may seem like "Freak Shows" in circus/carnivals of old,but still these performances are awe-inspiring even today,sometimes hundreds of years later. The most incredible is the severely handicapped Matthew Buchinger, master engraver/artist, who had neither hands nor feet, perhaps neglected among art historians, but revived thanks to Mr. Jay. There are many others here as well, perhaps equally interesting and unusual, but you can be sure that Mr. Buchinger's story is worth the price of admission here!!
Rating:
Summary: AN amazing work of scholarship
Review: Ricky Jay, card virtuoso, has collecting a fascinating volume dealing with all manner of unusual, exotic, and bizarre performers. It is written with style, wit and humor: a thoroughly engaging work of scholarship. If you are unacquainted with Ricky Jay, let this book be your intro. if you are a fan, you will treasure every moment that you spend reading this remarkable book.
Rating: 
Summary: "Beautifully crafted prose in praise of pointlessly gifted"
Review: This review is a precis of Adam Bresnick's comments in Forbes Magazine, Feb. 22, '99. Ricky Jay is one of the more engaging figures in American entertainment - a cunning vaudellian, a resourceful actor and a delightful writer. But is is Jay's prose that may prove his most delightful contribution to civilization. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has just reissued Jay's Learned Pigs & Firproof Women, a beautifully crafted homage to some of the most pointlessly gifted individuals the stage has ever seen. "The Man Who Grows," was able to stretch his body from 5 feet, 10 inches, to 6 foot, 4 in front of astonished audiences. Blind Tom, an African-American idiot savant of the 19th century, had no formal musical education, yet upon hearing a song, he could immediately duplicate it on the piano. Read about these and more - this book is a masterful performance itself and is sure to beguile even the most skeptical reader with its unremiting weirdness.
Rating:
Summary: A treasure
Review: This wonderful book profiles some of the most unusual entertainers of all times: calculating pigs and acrobatic horses, stone eaters, poison resisters, daredevils, and mind readers. The contents of this meticulously researched and lovingly presented book often boggle the mind, inducing, at times, a wonderment that is nearly stupefying. Profusely illustrated with contemporary broadsides, lithographs, and photographs, the book is also enlivened by JayÕs seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of each performerÕs antecedents, biography, and critical reception. Engrossing from start to finish, but particularly notable for JayÕs account of the controversial career and bizarre death of mind reader Washington Irving Bishop, whose story beggars imagination. Also not to be missed is the final chapter on Joseph Pujol, whose career as Le PŽtomane was based on his ability to create music and sound effects with the least reputable of bodily orifices. A treasure
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Summary: a catalogue of the amazing
Review: You've come to the right place. Buy _Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women_ if you want amazing stories, incredible histories, unbelievable accounts of some of the best acts of the last few centuries. If I didn't know Ricky Jay's fine reputation as a magic historian, I'd think this book was a joke. The people and acts described are too outlandish, too impressive to be true. But I trust Jay to strike awe into me, and he does so repeatedly and without fail in this book. The book's illustrations and photographs are marvelous supplements to Jay's smoothly written histories of performers--memory artists, dwarf magicians without arms or legs, women who walk into ovens. This is the quintessential introduction to this bizarre world.
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