The Great Absquatulator [Paperback]

Alfred Thomas Wood was nothing and everything. One hundred years before the Hollywood filmThe Great Impostor, Wood, the Great Absquatulator, roved through the momentous mid-19th century events from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the U.S. Mid-West, and the South. An Oxford-educated preacher in Maine and Boston, he claimed to be a Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity in Liberia, whereas neither University admitted black students then. He spent 18 months in an English prison. In Hamburg in 1854, he published a history of Liberia in German. Later, in Montreal, he claimed to have been Superintendent of Public Works in Sierra Leone. He served the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as an Oxford-educated DD, then toiled in post-Civil War Tennessee as a Cambridge-trained MD. People who knew him couldn’t wait to forget him. In his Foreword, Rapper Webster (Aly Ndiaye) compares Wood to a mid-19th-century Forrest Gump but also to Malcolm X, before Malcolm became political."The Great Absquatulatoris a feat of historical sleuthing, dogged archive-digging and sure-handed storytelling." —Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette"Here's a great non-fiction title from Baraka Books that will surely stand as one of my favorite reads of 2021. True crime? Check. Historical true crime? Check. International true crime? Check. Well-researched? Check. This book checks all the proverbial boxes for its genre(s). Frank Mackey has compiled a truly fascinating story of the life of Alfred Thomas Wood, a truly great imposter, but an incredibly absurd one at times."--James Fisher,The Miramichi Reader"Waging a one-man con game against a society that set out to crush him, Wood emerges as a flawed but fascinating historical character. (. . .) [an] impressively researched biography." —Canada's History.Frank Mackeyisl7