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Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World
Picador
May 2003
320 pages ISBN: 0312300336 Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Biography
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
perhaps 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. René
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.
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