Chasing the Last Laugh

Starred review from February 15, 2016
In 1895, at the age of 60, Mark Twain, the nation’s highest-paid author at the time, faced financial disaster. To raise cash, he launched a yearlong lecture tour of 122 performances spanning several continents. As Zacks (The Pirate Hunter) relates in this deeply entertaining account, Twain’s rugged journey was redemptive. While restoring his spirit through the excitement of travel, the laughter of audiences, and the admiration of global high society, Twain made good money. Zacks’s book brims with side adventures, including intercontinental sea voyages and visits to African diamond mines. Australia welcomed Twain as a superstar with billboards calling him “the greatest humorist of the century.” Twain was fevered and sick in India, a land he nonetheless ended up adoring. His precarious finances became a well-known gossip item, but Zacks stresses that the public loved him all the more for his fortitude in crisis and successful efforts to pay off his debts. Twain spent four years in Europe after the tour and then returned to America to receive unprecedented tribute and adulation. Zacks’s narrative is well-researched with rich detail, some drawn from unpublished archival material at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and it will strike ardent Twain fans and history lovers as fresh and inspiring. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

February 15, 2016
An amusing, singular account of the world tour by the nation's most famous humorist, chased by creditors. Zacks (Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, 2012, etc.) journeys with Mark Twain (1835-1910) on his around-the-world tour in 1896, when he peddled his "greatest hits" to live admiring audiences in order to gain enough money to keep his creditors at home in check. Having made several disastrous investments--e.g., buying a publishing house and putting his nephew in charge and backing James W. Paige's pie-in-the-sky mechanical typesetter--Twain also had to support his heiress wife, Livy, and three daughters in grand style in Paris. On the advice of his friend and fellow investor, oil baron H.H. Rogers, Twain turned over all of his assets, including his book copyrights and Paige stock, to his wife to avoid persecution and embarked, with Livy and middle daughter Clara, on a world tour as essentially a stand-up comedian. He offered snippets from his more hilarious material while drumming up thousands of dollars to pay the creditors. Zacks has thoroughly mined the notebooks Twain kept on the tour--which detailed his "almost bizarre" range of interests: "religious preferences in ant colonies, worst public floggings, the anonymity of executioners, the insecurities of God"--and letters home to the two daughters who stayed behind, while tracking the family's progress across Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and London. Apparently, Twain was beginning to enjoy himself immensely, and these snippets of his performances are endearing and affecting. Although the news of the sudden death of daughter Susy in 1896 dampened the family's homecoming, Twain was able to recoup many of his losses with new publishing and magazine contracts--and thanks to the financial wiliness of Rogers. Between the dizzying sums lost and gained, Zacks offers a rollicking history perfect for Twain's countless fans.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016

Zacks has penned popular books on subjects ranging from the pirate Captain Kidd to Theodore Roosevelt's antivice crusade in New York. His latest is a compelling exploration of a tumultuous period in the life of the American author Mark Twain. In 1895, prior to turning 60, Twain began an exhausting world tour to earn money to pay off creditors after his publishing firm collapsed. Embarrassed and nearly broke, he spent a year traveling constantly, while lecturing to spellbound audiences in North America, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. He then wrote an account of his adventures in England and drifted throughout Europe with his family. By the time he finally returned home in 1900, he had paid off his debts in full and earned worldwide acclaim. Any book about Twain during those years can't fail to be lively, but Zacks's fluid prose and attention to broader contexts take his narrative even further, making it a rich and often revealing work, unmatched in its intimate details of the lecture tour and Twain's financial problems. VERDICT A welcome contribution to Twain scholarship, Zacks's book will also be relished by general readers. Recommended for most collections.--R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2016
Who knew that for a talented author a mountain of debts could provoke laughter heard round the planet? In this fast-paced chronicle, Zacks recounts how the 60-year-old Mark Twain dissolves a huge debt incurred through imprudent business dealings as he sets out on a world tour exploiting his singular gift for deadpan mirth. Readers join Twain on lecture platforms in the American West, Australia, India, and Africa, sharing in the mock drama and real hilarity of routines such as Grandfather's Old Ram, with its cornpone storytelling laced with sly impiety, and The Golden Arm, with its explosively amusing finale. But even as Twain draws crowds with his jokes, he experiences the serious trials of nineteenth-century travelincluding illness and long-distance family troublestrials that Zacks exposes to view. And excerpts from journals and correspondence uncover private reflections at odds with Twain's persona as a gypsy comedian, as the author fumes over the human stupidity and chicanery he sees. A divertingand revealinglook at a neglected episode in Twain's life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)