Barnum: An American Life

by Robert Wilson,
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 18, 2019

“There are some things in my Autobiography which may honestly be objected to,” Phineas T. Barnum declared in 1855. But he asked readers — and critics who decried the book as yet another of his “humbugs” — to acknowledge that there were “some good streaks” in his life as well, “for I do not admire the doctrine of total depravity.”