FREAK SHOW Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit<i> by Robert Bogdan (University of Chicago: $29.95) </i>

The sideshows, odditoriums and “Museums of Nature’s Mistakes� that were an American tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are easy targets for derision. They made money by spotlighting others’ misfortune and reinforced ethnocentric American notions--creating “savage Africans,� for example, to confirm notions of racial superiority. Ridiculing the freak show is itself an easy way of assuming superiority, however, and not an entirely honest one at that, for how many of us wouldn’t crane our necks while passing a nasty accident on the Harbor Freeway? Fortunately, Robert Bogdan, a professor of special education and sociology at Syracuse University, recognizes our common compulsion at the outset: “There will be exhibits,� he writes (79 photographs accompany this text), “and it will be OK to look.�

His objective in these pages is not so much to moralize as to show that “how we view people who are different has less to do with what they are physiologically than with who we are culturally. . . . Freak shows can teach us not to confuse the role a person plays with who that person really is.� Bogdan divides freaks in two types: “Made freaks,� people often packaged to “parallel creatures of ancient mythology� (kindling belief in races of tailed people, dwarfs and giants), and “Born Freaks,� people with physical deformities. Bogdan’s book is weakened by his overly defensive stance toward sideshows (he says exhibitors of African “savages� were only trying to “put on a good show,� for instance) and by his hesitance to trace voyeuristic tendencies to the present day (TV news, some might say, is a modern-day freak show, quick to dispatch mini-cam crews to the latest murder site or car crash). Overall, though, this is an unusual voyage from the mid-19th Century, when freaks were believed to be another species, to the early 20th Century, when science showed them to be merely examples of human fragility, taking the fun out of the freak show and thus hastening its demise.