Oloef Krarer may be one of America's most effective impostors of the twentieth century. Born in Iceland in 1858, she moved to the United States at age nineteen. Because she was a dwarf, the only job she could get was as the wife in a dwarf couple at a circus. It wasn't long before she fabricated a new life for herself, as an Inuit Eskimo from Greenland.

It's estimated that Krarer gave more than 2,500 lectures around the country, including talks at universities, on life in Greenland as an Eskimo. Nearly all the information she gave was made up, uninformed, and just plain wrong, but no one, from William Jennings Bryan to Robert Peary, ever disputed her facts.

Americans at the time were intensely interested in life in the far North, thanks in part to the first attempts to reach the North Pole. Bjoernsdottir puts Krarer in that context and explains how dramatic improvements in railroad transportation and an extreme shortage of entertainment helped drive her popularity. She also describes the role of the circus at the time, attitudes toward dwarfs and other deviants, and the possible psychological reasons for Krarer's deceptions.

This is a fascinating story about a great female con artist, but also an interesting look at the culture and society of America in the late nineteenth century.