The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

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About The King Of Confidence: A Tale Of Utopian

Product Description The "unputdownable" (Dave Eggers, National Book award finalist) story of the most infamous American con man you've never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, "perfect for fans of The Devil in the White City" (Kirkus) A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "A masterpiece." -- Nathaniel Philbrick   In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king.   From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country. The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country's boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.   Review “A jaunty, far-ranging history... Despite the frontier setting, there is something eerily contemporary about Harvey’s portrait of a real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative relationship to debt, and a genius for mass media... Harvey deploys small scraps of knowledge to great effect. His account of Strang’s rise and fall is littered with thumbnail histories of nineteenth-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati, and much else. This approach amounts to a sort of historical pointillism, bringing the manic, skittering mood of the era into focus. It is a style of history well suited to the antebellum decades, when American culture was most unabashedly itself... Harvey’s wonderfully digressive narrative is interspersed with news clippings, playbills, land surveys, and daguerreotypes, as if to periodically certify that all of this madness is really true... Rather than a biography of a single man, he offers a vivid portrait of the time and place in which a character like Strang could thrive.” ― Chris Jennings, New York Times Book Review “Harvey is a skillful writer and thoughtful researcher... He examines the bedeviled society [of antebellum America] through the life of James Jesse Strang, a strange man of many parts---most of them bad.” ― Howard Schneider, Wall Street Journal "The story of James Strang--a messianic con man who wreaks havoc on an island community of his own devising--is amazing in itself. But it is the telling of the tale--think Herman Melville meets Mark Twain--that makes The King of Confidence a masterpiece. This book has talons that sink into you and won't let go."― Nathaniel Philbrick, New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower “Deeply researched, artfully written, and splendidly compelling... Great writers deserve great subjects, and Miles Harvey, who has proven himself a great writer in two previous books, has found another subject worthy of his skills... A riveting book.” ― Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune “Harvey’s entertaining history… chronicles a manic, anxious, gullible time, not unlike our own.” ― New York Ti