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"Highly detailed and thoroughly researched book....Tribble tells it the way it should be told, by focusing on its players....The author also puts the hoax in its historical context."
--David Pitt in Booklist (Starred Review), January 1, 2009

"Tribble has taken a humorous topic and created an excellent historical narrative that develops the incredible story within the social and intellectual climate of the times. The unusual topic and Tribble's vivid detail make this one of the finest and most entertaining historical works I have read."
--Benjamin Baker in Academia (Profilers' Picks), April 2009

"Engagingly written in a thorough treatment that this popular culture phenomenon has not usually received, the book would make a welcome addition to public libraries."
--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress, in Library Journal, October 1, 2008

"Rowdy backstage tour of an outstanding 19th-century all-American scam."
--American History, June 2009

"It is clearly the definitive work on the subject."
--Joe Nickell in Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2009

"Fans of phony biblical giants and sideshow hooey will be pleased to know that an exhaustively researched book about the Cardiff Giant has now been published. In A Colossal Hoax: The Giant From Cardiff That Fooled America, author Scott Tribble not only relates the 'tall' tale of this manufactured mega-man, but also puts the craze in its proper Civil War era context."
--Anne D. Bernstein on RoadsideAmerica.com, April 30, 2009

"A Colossal Hoax is an exceptionally well-written narrative that is surely destined to become the definitive work on the Cardiff Giant, which is, itself, the definitive historical hoax in nineteenth-century America."
--Kenneth Feder, Central Connecticut State University

"In rich and often entertaining detail, Scott Tribble recovers the colorful case of the Cardiff Giant, along the way taking his reader on a sort of backstage tour of mid-nineteenth-century America, a place where science and faith, business and entertainment, philosophy and humbuggery could come together in some sensationally wacky ways. Astoundingly well-researched, A Colossal Hoax is also an absorbing and rewarding read."
--Judith Richardson, Stanford University