Carnival Undercover by Bret Witter







Fascinating book - lots of fun to read. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Published in 2003 by Plume.

"Who doesn't love a carnival, fair or amusement park? They have everything you could ask for: Fried food, dangerous-looking rides, macho games, freak shows, meat-on-a-stick, champion milking cows, and teenagers dressed up as giant stuffed animals...If that's not America, what is?"
The Marion County Fair - Indianapolis.
That's the opening quote of Carnival Undercover that tells you all the ins and outs of the carnival business - everything from the economics involved in owning a booth to how to become a carnie to ride safety to the freak shows. It also tells you how to win at certain games, the inside skinny on some of the major theme parks (did you know that Disney World has an underground vacuum powered garbage removal - much like the system at your bank's drive through window - so that you don't have to see any garbage being hauled through the park?) and which food booths to avoid at your local fair (chicken and fish due to easy spoilage and the booths that sell more than 2 or 3 items - the specialists are just better).

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Carnival Undercover.

 Reviewed in 2003.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution - A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Alister McGrath

Image
Strong, but not for those who are not well-versed in history   Originally published in 2007. Let me just note that Alister McGrath has taken on a large topic (Protestantism) in Christianity's Dangerous Idea and done about as well as one can in organizing the information and presenting it in a cogent and readable fashion. McGrath assumes that you already know a lot about history in general and about the last 500 years or so in particular. That is to be expected. If he had to explain every last detail this book it would have to have been 3,000 pages rather than the already hefty 478 pages of text plus 50+ pages of endnotes. If you are a person that has heard of the Huguenots, but are not sure if they are a native group in South Africa or a religious group in France, this book is not for you. This is not a complete history, either. It is an overview. If you are looking for a complete history of a particular denomination, you are likely to be disappointed. Some denom...
Read more

THE PROVING GROUND (Lincoln Lawyer #8) (audiobook) by Michael Connelly

Image
Published in 2025 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis The Lincoln Lawyer returns for another case in The Proving Ground . Mickey Haller has moved away from defense work to civil litigation. In this case, an AI program designed to be a friend substitute to young adults and teens told a teenage boy to get rid of his girlfriend in a way that could easily be interpreted as killing her. So, he took his father's unsecured pistol and shot her in the high school parking lot. Haller is suing the company for marketing a faulty product towards teens. He is pretty sure he has the goods - bad programming and an unethical marketing team that is more concerned about demonstrating the potential of the AI so the company can be absorbed by a bigger company with deep pockets. They wanted the payoff rather than making it safe. But, as Haller and his team start to dig, they find they are out of their depth. Tech writer Jack McEvoy come...
Read more

JAILBIRD by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Originally published in 1979. Synopsis Jailbird is the fictional story of William F. Starbuck, the least important member of the Watergate conspiracy to go to prison.  The story begins with the day that Starbuck is released from a makeshift federal prison (and very cushy, for a prison) on a Georgia military base. He has no idea what he is going to do and he doesn't have a lot of money, but he figures that he will be okay - after all, he has a degree from Harvard and he learned how to be a bartender in a correspondence class while he was in prison. What follows is a wild tale of good and bad coincidences that take Starbuck to a broken-down residential motel in New York City. Like the hotel, Starbuck is a broken man in many ways - he is an ex-con, his wife of many years has passed away, he never speaks to his son, and he feels shame for accidentally ruining the career of one of his friends due to an offhand comment he made during a anti-Communist Congressional hearing lead by then-C...
Read more

THIS BOOK WON'T BURN (audiobook) by Samira Ahmed

Image
Published by Little, Brown Young Readers in 2024. Read by Kauser Mohammed. Duration: 10 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Book summary Noor Khan is a senior in high school and she is devastated. Her father walked out on her family and moved back to his native England. He gave no warning and the family is reeling. Noor's mother decides that a change of location would be best. Noor, her little sister (a freshman), and her mom move from their diverse upper middle class Chicago neighborhood to a downstate Illinois small town so that her mom can work at a small college.  Noor hates it. She misses her friends and the vibrancy of Chicago. She also feels like an oddity because she is Indian and Muslim in a school that is very white and very Christian.  She determines to gut out this one last semester of high school and then head back to Chicago to go to college. She decides she doesn't need friends or even to enjoy this small town - she just needs to get in, get the diploma and then get ...
Read more

THE HIGHWAY (Cody Hoyt #2, Cassie Dewell #2) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

Image
Published by Macmillan Audio in 2013 Read by Holter Graham Duration: 9 hours, 53 minutes Unabridged If you are a big fan of the TV show Criminal Minds  or the movie The Silence of the Lambs  you will probably enjoy this book quite a bit. For me, the fascination of getting into the head of a serial killer has long since passed and I end up feeling soiled and abused after every excursion into this area. But, I read The Highway because I do enjoy C.J. Box's work quite a bit and I grudgingly like his Cody Hoyt character - he is exasperating and full of gigantic character flaws but just when you have had enough of him he pulls himself together and he gets the job done. In a bit of a reach (actually, in a real big reach) the young female characters from his book Back of Beyond  are caught up in another dangerous situation and Cody Hoyt is called out to rescue them once again. This time they have a run-in with a long haul trucker that kills himself the Lizard King. T...
Read more

SING DOWN the MOON by Scott O'Dell

Image
Originally published in 1970. Named a Newberry Honor Book in 1971. Set in the New Mexico and Arizona territories in 1863-1865, Sing Down the Moon is the story of a teenaged Navajo girl named Bright Morning.  Despite the fact that the American Civil War is raging in the East, this is a tough time for the Navajo. There are pressures from the people they call Spaniards who raid the Navajo and other Native Americans in search of slaves (undoubtedly the "Spaniards" were Spanish-speaking Mexicans that were living in the territory before Mexico lost it to the United States at the end of the Mexican War in 1848.) But, that's not the worst of it. In 1864, the U.S. military under Kit Carson (called Long Knives in this book) rounded up all of the Navajo and put them in a concentration camp called Bosque Redondo. The Navajo in the book are unsure as to why they were forced to come to the camp, but the ongoing threat of Confederate raids into Arizona and New Mexico had a lot to do wi...
Read more

DOCTOR WHO: DESTINY of the DOCTOR #3: VENGEANCE of the STONES (audiobook) by Andrew Smith

Image
Published in 2013 by AudioGo (Blackstone/BBC)   Read by Richard Franklin and Trevor Littledale Duration: 1 hour Unabridged. As a part of the 50th Anniversary celebration of Doctor Who, the BBC released a series of audiobooks called Destiny of the Doctor . Each of the Doctors has a 1 hour audiobook story. In Vengeance of the Stones  the Doctor and UNIT are called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a RAF fighter jet from the skies above Scotland. While the Doctor is poking around he encounters Lt. Mike Yates for the first time (who becomes Captain Mike Yates and a companion in the television series).  The Doctor soon discovers that the disappearance of the jet is the work of an alien species that has a ancient grudge against humanity and that they are the reason for the prevalence of so many recumbent stone circles in this area.  A recumbent stone circle in Scotland. Photo by Bill McKelvie Also, he discovers that these aliens are more t...
Read more

BRAVE COMPANIONS: PORTRAITS in HISTORY (audiobook) by David MCCullough

Image
Originally published in hardback book form in 1991. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged Brave Companions: Portraits in History  is a collection of previously published articles and speeches. It's a smattering of this and that - sometimes it's about art, sometimes about scientists, sometimes about politicians and sometimes it's just some musings from McCullough about history. It doesn't matter, almost all of it is interesting and well-told. McCullough understands the value of telling history as a story - as always he is very approachable. My favorite entry was the story of the railroad that preceded the Panama Canal. It was an amazing story of the power of human will against nature. McCullough reads this audiobook, which is great because McCullough has a fantastic speaking voice and is well known for his voice work. I envy both his writing ability and his talents as a speaker. My fav...
Read more

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published by Hourly History in October of 2025. John Wesley Hardin (1853-1895) is the archetype of the Old West gunman in so many ways: a) He was most active in the immediate post-Civil War era; b) His violence was not really directed for any larger cause, mostly just family beefs or perceived personal insults; c) Eventually, his violent ways caused his death. Hardin was credited with more than 20 murders, although he claimed he killed 42 men. He wasn't fighting to prove a point, like Billy the Kid claimed to. He wasn't fighting as an extension of the Civil War, like Jesse James claimed to be doing. Instead, Hardin was literally running and gunning as he fled from one jurisdiction to another. He hid among an immense extended family network, eventually killed someone, and then fled to another location to hide among another set of cousins. I found this to be an interesting read. Hardin was clearly some sort of sociopath - anyone who kills 42 people in multiple settings in less th...
Read more

BEHIND the BLUE and GRAY: THE SOLDIER'S LIFE in the CIVIL WAR by Delia Ray

Image
Published in 1991 by Scholastic. 93 pages of text.  9 pages of a bibliography, a glossary, an index and picture credits. Behind the Blue and Gray is a simple introduction to what the average Civil War soldier. I would recommend it for grades 5 and above. However, saying it is for those grades does not mean an adult interested in starting to study the Civil War would not find this book interesting. It is similar to the introductory books that are published by the National Parks that you can find at Civil War battlefields. The book follows the progress of a few Civil War soldiers as they enroll in their respective armies, set up camps, train, march and eventually fight. It also explores what happened to prisoners and the injured. At the end, it discussed the aftermath of the war and ends with a photo of elderly former Union and Confederate soldiers at a reunion gathering. There is not a lot about women in the war as a topic, but there are a few pages about Native Americans a...
Read more