Scams!

Marie St. Onge-Davidson is president of the Essential English Centre in
Ottawa.

From Cultural Minister Manuel Elizalde’s Stone Age cavemen scam in the
Philippines in 1971, to German Karl May’s Wild West adventures (he
never visited America), Andreas Schroeder has compiled a fine collection
of 10 true stories about swindlers and tricksters around the world and
over the centuries.

Although most people are aware of scams, there are many who get conned
every day. The scams Schroeder writes about include William Ireland’s
forgeries of Shakespeare’s works in the 1790s; PT Barnum’s
“There’s a sucker born every minute” entertaining cons;
“heiress” Therese d’Aurignac’s 19th-century French bank-loan
fraud; Donald Crowhurst’s lie (he faked winning a round-the-world
sailboat race in 1969); Sir Thomas Phillipps’s 19th-century maniacal
quest to own every book he could find; the Germans’ World War II plan
to flood Britain with counterfeit currency; John Keely’s late
19th-century motor-engine “invention” that bilked investors out of
thousands of dollars; and the CBS announcement—“One of the worst
military disasters in modern times!”—deceptively used to promote a
radio drama. Schroeder’s detailed accounts of these often brilliantly
conceived scams are well written and hold the reader’s attention right
to the end.

The book’s brief introduction clarifies the nature of a scam, and two
pages at the end offer sources for further research on each of the 10
stories.

Andreas Schroeder is a Prussian-born Canadian novelist, non-fiction
writer, and poet. For a number of years he reported on strange crimes
and criminals on CBC Radio’s Basic Black program. Scams! is
Schroeder’s fourth book on hoaxes and his first for younger readers.
Highly recommended.