Rosenberg is, according to the book's Foreword by Buckminster Fuller, a processor of trivia. When faced with a mystery, he "process[es] whole acres of trivia - significant details overlooked by others." In this way, he has been able to get at the (possible) reasons behind the actions of various historical figures, and uses that information to (re)create what Fuller calls "highly plausible but sometimes directly undocumented intimate episodes" in the lives of these people. By using these methods, Rosenberg gives us, in this volume, his hypotheses of events in the lives of Mary Shelley (creator of Frankenstein's monster), Herman Melville, Albert Schweitzer, and Lot's wife, among others. He includes an interesting chapter on the possible origin of the Santa Claus figure, as well as information about child-prodigy William James Sidis, who went from entering Harvard at the age of 11, to working subsistence jobs and collecting streetcar transfers (and writing perhaps the most boring book in the world, Notes on the Collection of Transfers).
While the book contains some pieces of interesting information (including an account of the author's 1955 interview of Schweitzer), I was turned off by the very thing that is Rosenberg's stock-in-trade - his tendency to make an assumptive jump in logic from a collection of random facts to a full-blown (alleged) episode in a person's life. While it is entirely possible that the figure of Dr. Frankenstein was based on Mary Shelley's father and her husband, we have no actual physical proof of that fact, merely the author's assumption and supposition. The book was enjoyable, however, for the new information (trivia) it gave me on Sidis, Melville, and the strange triangle of Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poet Byron.
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