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Carregando... Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World (2001)de Paul S. Collins
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. This was a fun little book, and one of the first that I was reading for fun once I moved on to library school. Here is part of what I wrote back when I read it in 2002: >>All the stories were interesting to read, and in some instances, shed further light on the late 19th century and the American literature of that period. I think the book succeeded not only in telling of men like Banvard or Psalmanazar, which it does in bringing to life such persons with good research and clear writing, but also brings in the context and eras in which the people described lived helping thus to explain how some of them were successful, if for a brief time or how certain frauds could work. I always find interesting to look at the societies as much as the people. This is a book I would gladly recommend. Collins collects stories of mostly-forgotten innovators and fantasists in the arts, literature, agriculture, cosmology, inter alia. We get a man who invented a universal language composed of musical notes (“Beethoven’s 5th begins by saying something about Wednesday”), a polyglot Irish shyster in 18th c. London begging alms in Latin, blue-light baths proffered as an infallible remedy for anything from rheumatism to railway collisions, and a natural theology of universal geometry in accord with the Anthropic Principle that imagined intelligent minds on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Some chapters fascinate more than others, and sometimes the prose falls flat, but overall an entertaining read. Roy Pitz Best Blonde Newcastle Brown Ale Divertissement assai interessante, situato storicamente nei paesi anglosassoni, perlopiù tra il 1600 ed il 1800. R.W.Emerson appare spesso, come comparsa. Chissà se vuol dire qualcosa...Saggio che diventa morale laddove illustra come il genio non sia nulla senza avvedutezza e onestà. Ce lo si augura anche a proposito dei (geniali) finanzieri e dei (geniali) politicanti italioti di ultima razza. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated. Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck - or some combination of them all - leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day... before he decided to go head-to-head with P. T. Barnum. Ren ?Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard - until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation, his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers. Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures, and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly, sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude, here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions - acts of excavation and reclamation - to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Anyway, the book is great. Some of the stories are less interesting than others, but even so the writing is brilliant throughout. Bonus: one of the stories describes a specific location in San Francisco, and using Google Maps Street View you can actually see what he's talking about.
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