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angus_mckeogh's review against another edition
2.0
The premise sounded so interesting yet the book was extremely boring. Ostensibly it's about some prolific writer that was supposedly recording an Oral History of the World (which was actually more his personal interactions with other people) that had run out to hundreds of thousands of pages. However, upon reading the book, it's about a certified insane individual that claims he's doing all this writing (and apparently hardly writes at all) who happens to somehow be friendly with some literary characters (i.e. William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound) and ultimately a failed attempt to find this manuscript. It turns into more of a scant biography because again the manuscript can't really be located. Which would be fine; however, almost nothing is known about this guy so the disseminated information about his life ends up being non-existent or hearsay. Disappointing but well-written.
candacesiegle_greedyreader's review against another edition
3.0
New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell wrote highly popular pieces about New York City oddballs and eccentrics. Joe Gould was the subject of two profiles, one in 1942 and another in 1964. What made Gould interesting to Mitchell was his "The Oral History of Our Time," a mammoth project allegedly nine million words long. When Mitchell returned to Gould in the 60's, he ruled that the Oral History had never existed, and by that time Gould was dead and could not argue otherwise. After the story came out people from all over the country sent Mitchell scribbled notebooks and scraps of Gould's writing that seemed to prove that he was working on something, but Mitchell was done with Gould and never followed up.
Enter literary detective Jill Lepore. She sets out to find those notebooks to see if the Oral History ever existed an any form at all.
She traces Gould's life, revealing a sad trail of serious mental illness, alcoholism, racism, stalking women, and some talent. A number of famous writers of the time--ee cummings, Ezra Pound--went to great lengths to keep Gould out of mental institutions, even though it probably would have been better for him and certainly better for some of his stalking victims.
I feel for Jill Lepore, and admire her courage.The character she chose to explore is not a genius stricken by psychosis. He's repugnant. The more you know, the harder it is to care about about his alleged masterwork. But Jill does not flinch from this downer project and completes it will an impressive reel of footnotes and extensive bibliography.
But was Joe Gould worth her trouble? I'm not sure. "Joe Gould's Teeth" is a sad project. Everything around him seemed to stink of urine and bad breath. I admire the commitment without feeling enlightened about the subject.
Enter literary detective Jill Lepore. She sets out to find those notebooks to see if the Oral History ever existed an any form at all.
She traces Gould's life, revealing a sad trail of serious mental illness, alcoholism, racism, stalking women, and some talent. A number of famous writers of the time--ee cummings, Ezra Pound--went to great lengths to keep Gould out of mental institutions, even though it probably would have been better for him and certainly better for some of his stalking victims.
I feel for Jill Lepore, and admire her courage.The character she chose to explore is not a genius stricken by psychosis. He's repugnant. The more you know, the harder it is to care about about his alleged masterwork. But Jill does not flinch from this downer project and completes it will an impressive reel of footnotes and extensive bibliography.
But was Joe Gould worth her trouble? I'm not sure. "Joe Gould's Teeth" is a sad project. Everything around him seemed to stink of urine and bad breath. I admire the commitment without feeling enlightened about the subject.
wrensleyreads's review against another edition
fast-paced
2.25
This book reads like someone typed up a wall of post it notes of various sizes. The author frequently walks right up to an incredibly interesting thread, flags it, and then turns around and walks out. I've never read a book and left with functionally zero gained experience, though, to be fair, my stress level is slightly higher, so maybe that counts.
As to the thesis...does Gould's manuscript exist? The author admits at least twice, referencing two different opportunitiesto investigate directly and, like the journalist Mitchell she takes shots at over and over, she admits she just didn't dig anymore.
Overall, the entire book is amateurish, unfocused, and I deeply regretting giving it the time of day.
As to the thesis...does Gould's manuscript exist? The author admits at least twice, referencing two different opportunities
Overall, the entire book is amateurish, unfocused, and I deeply regretting giving it the time of day.
raeannmichelle's review against another edition
challenging
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
3.0
samarov's review against another edition
reviewed in the Chicago Reader
Joe Gould was a legendary nut. He was the kind of street person whose rants sometimes cohered into poetry. He couldn't stop writing, filling many dozens of cheap notebooks and stashing them with various friends and benefactors around New York City and elsewhere, a few of the books made it as far as Europe. He claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time”. He expressed his ambition thus: “I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.”
Joe Gould was a legendary nut. He was the kind of street person whose rants sometimes cohered into poetry. He couldn't stop writing, filling many dozens of cheap notebooks and stashing them with various friends and benefactors around New York City and elsewhere, a few of the books made it as far as Europe. He claimed to be writing “The Oral History of Our Time”. He expressed his ambition thus: “I would like to widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry.”
Was he an unrecognized mad genius or just another lost crackpot? He had long-lasting friendships with the poets Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings, had his portrait painted by Alice Neel, and was immortalized in two classic Joseph Mitchell New Yorker profiles (“Professor Sea Gull” and “Joe Gould's Secret”). Many eminent people fed, housed, and otherwise helped him. There were numerous attempts to publish his magnum opus. But the manuscript could never seem to be assembled in one place. Did it even exist outside a madman's mind?
In Jill Lepore's diverting new book Joe Gould's Teeth, she attempts to separate fact from fiction, but can't help but fall under the odd little man's spell, just like all the writers, philanthropists, cultural mavens, and curiosity-seekers who came before her. Still, as a responsible academic, she digs through the scattered archives of Gould's papers in an attempt to establish what he did and did not do. “I got to thinking that what had at first looked like contradictions weren't contradictions at all. Instead they were evidence of a pattern. The Oral History existed, and then it didn't; it didn't, and then it did. He wrote it; he lost it. He was a genius; he was a blind man.”
Unravelling the tangled threads of Gould's life, Lepore traces his peripatetic education at Harvard, his various but inevitably short-lived stretches of employment, and his involvement with luminaries of New York bohemia, the Harlem Renaissance, the eugenics movement, and an untold number of other odd conglomerations and associations. In his aimless wanderings the man had a talent for charming all kinds of people, insinuating himself into their lives, then inevitably overstepping his bounds by aggressively demanding contributions to “The Joe Gould Fund”, or, if his prey was a woman, by his lewdness and vulgarity. It is no accident that in Neel's great portrait she painted him with three penises.
Some of the best sections of the book concern a now mostly forgotten African-American sculptor named Augusta Savage. Gould pursued her relentlessly to the point that she had to flee the city to get away from him. Unlike the funny eccentric presented by his many admirers, this is a Gould who is obsessive and ugly. In this and many other points to which her research led, Lepore was forced to conclude that the definitive answers she hoped to uncover might never appear, “It has taken me a very long time, my whole life, to learn that the asymmetry of the historical record isn't always a consequence of people being silenced against their will. Some people don't want to be remembered, or heard, or saved. They want to be left alone.”
Joe Gould met his end alone as well. He died in a mental asylum, possibly lobotomized, most likely subject to multiple electric shock sessions. His Oral History has never been found. But the irresistible urge to search for it, to believe that at the back of some closet in a shuttered loony bin or a chicken farm on Long Island, volumes of a lost history lie waiting to be found, has not been sated even some 60 years after the man's passing. Lepore's book is as much about all the people, including herself, who project meaning and significance onto the work and personality of Joe Gould as it is about the man himself. Throughout history there have been peculiar characters who have captured the imagination of everyone they come into contact with, blinding them to obvious flaws and permitting all of us to imagine wonders just beyond what most of us can fathom. We owe Lepore a debt of gratitude for re-intoducing us to one of the strangest strangers to have ever walked among us.
fractaltexan's review against another edition
4.0
An interesting read, considering that, until the class on Public History that I'm currently enrolled in, I'd never heard of Joe Gould. Lepore does a good job of exploring this figure and his missing work.
bookworm120's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.0
Joe Gould is messed up. And the book was not very good.
dllh's review against another edition
3.0
I picked this up somewhat randomly at a random bookstore in Oregon during a recent visit. The cover captured my attention, and I recognized Lepore's name, as she wrote a book about Wonder Woman that I purchased as a gift a few years ago (I've always meant to read that one but have never gotten around to it). The jacket copy made it seem compelling -- here was this bizarre Modern-literature-adjacent figure I had never heard of, though I'm pretty familiar with that period in English literature. And the book started off fascinatingly enough. But the deeper I got into it, the less satisfying it was. It was fine. It was a short read that cost me very little effort to get through. It just never really had a payoff. Maybe that's by design (minor spoilers ahead), given the lack of a satisfying payoff for the snipe hunt Lepore went on when writing the book. Maybe the book is mimetic of her experience hunting for the Gould manuscript. Even if there's such cleverness at play, it was ultimately only so satisfying to me. I liked the book well enough. I didn't like it a lot. I'm glad to've learned about Gould, at any rate (though glad never to've had to meet him!).