Access Today Banvards Folly: Thirteen Tales Of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, And Rotten Luck Crafted By Paul Collins Compiled As EText

it comes to a book like this, the best sign that it succeeded is if it leaves you wishing you could read fulllength biographies of the subjects.
i'm pleased to report that was very often the case with Banvard's Folly, consistently engaging and engrossing. Delightful stories about obscure, amazing, strange people who were often vastly famous in their own time but in a century or two became entirely forgotten.
The last couple entries are very much lesser, but the book is still great overall,

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Once the world's most famous painter, John Banvard died penniless why The stories of forgotten people read by Andrew Sachs./At some point of the Parks and Recreation sitcom, the character Tom publishes a book called something like "Failure a Success Story", The message of the book, as well as the whole episode and the story arc of Tom himself, is that failure is good to succeed you need to try and if you try, you'll fail.
This is also a topic of a lot of selfhelp initiatives, trying to help us overcome the ingrained prejudice that success is the only possibility.
Paul Collins contributes to this whole discussion in a different but fascinating way by exploring historical failures one has not heard about,

Banvard's Folly contains stories ofpeople who gave it their best in life but ended up dead and forgotten, Some of them have had an easier time before that, some did less well but all of them share the fate of being ultimately wrong or unrewarded.
The stories remind us that yes, there are Larry Pages and Bill Gateses out there that will hit it big, as well as there are Florence Foster Jenkinses, whose failures become famous, but for each and every one of these there is a crowd of people that were just a bit less lucky and, as the title says, did not change the world.
The book reminds us that failure is a part of life, that one needs to give it their best and, well, a lot of it comes down to bad luck.


Banvard's Folly is a delightful and a not overly long read that will make you a star of any nerdy party.
For added points, make sure to read through the recommended literature at the end, which, among a lot of good advice, contains gems of humour that are rare to see in these parts of books.
Everyone knows about famous people, Thats why theyre called famous, But what of all those people who accomplished great things, made great strides, and then were simply forgotten Thats what Banvards Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didnt Change the World sets out to answer.
The book chronicles the lives of thirteen interesting individuals who tried hard enough, but, for one reason or another, became nothing more than a footnote in history if theyre lucky.
Most notable among the stories is that of Ephraim Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape, Bull, the first to breed a hardy, sweet grape in America, was sure he would become enormously wealthy selling his grapes, The issue More established farmers bought his grapes the first season and made their own, Or, consider was Rene Blondlot, a French scientist who became a worldwide sensation when he discovered a new kind of radiation he named NRays.
Unfortunately, it was found out that Blondlot had simply been faking his results all along, and other scientists simply agreed because they didnt want to look stupid.
He was found out just months before he was expected to win theNobel Prize, Banvards other stories are just as interesting if not flat out ridiculous accounts of people throughout history, some of whom were smart but unlucky, and others who were simply the Milli Vanillis of their day.
I have been reading this foryears now so it is so satisfying to finally finish! Perfect book if you'd like a little snippet of different histories and forgotten stories.
The name dropping is fantastic, with famous people popping up in each tale, from PT Barnum, to Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A little wordy at times I think you have to be when discussing natural theology but overall the variety of the stories is highly entertaining and a great book to read a chapter at a time every few months.
QIAn uneven, not quite cohesive collection of essays,

Paul Collins opens these thirteen pieces with a very short introduction, He says that he wanted to write about people with grand ambitions, but who failedpeople who were once famous, or at least, perhaps, talked about, but are only remembered now by those with an antiquarian cast of mind.
It's the only thing tying the book together, the introduction, and even it doesn't quite capture what is going on here,

Take the first three stories: one about John Banvard, who, during theth century, was a very famous and very rich artist, having innovated panoramic displays, but who then lost his money and was forgotten by American culture one about William Henry Ireland, who created a legion of fake Shakespeare documents in lateth and earlythcentury London, before being exposed and one about John Cleve Symmes, athcentury American army officer, who wrote treatises showing that the earth was hollow.


Tying these together as people who "didn't change the world"as the subtitle has itdoesn't quite capture what was going on.
Symmes is probably the only one who can be said to want to change the worldnot just physically, by inventing a hollow core, but intellectually, in the way it is thought about.
And, as it happens, he's the most wellknown of the triumvirate, object of attention by a host of fringe theorists,

The other two, Banvardwho gives the book its titleand Ireland, were trying to make a buck and prove their worth to a distant father, respectively.
That they gained some notoriety in the process does not mean that they were trying to make themselves into worldhistorical figures, or change the course of human culture.
That they are forgotten puts them in the same category as most of humanity,

There's a certain condescension here, wrapped though in sweetness, It's not a surprise, then, that Collins, and some of the essays here, were connected with Dave Eggers and McSweeney'swhose house style, as best as I can determine, tends to mix the schmaltzy with the patronizing, one covering the other.
Collins can be a bit bitchy in the endnotesdismissing books as having the air of the dissertation about them or for being selfindulgent rich, for a guy whose bio includes that he wrote for eCompany Now, but he keeps this under wraps during the essays, which do show a light touch.


He can write, and he has seemingly done his research, The essays breeze by, bagatelles, with no obvious unity, aside from one or two small attempts by Collins to link events in one episode with those of another.
As they proceed, they get more and more loose, the subjects sometimes obscured in their own stories, Collins measures these people on a strict scale, especially those who offered alternative scientific theories: this meant that they were deluded or pathological, in his reckoning.


Having gone through these, though, I do notice a unifying theme it's not perfectthere are exceptions, as well as caveatsand I am not sure that Collins himself is aware of it, but it works.


Back in, Constance Rourke wrote a booklength essay "American Humor," identifying three stock characters, One of these was the Yankee Peddler, who would come into distant towns, tell stories, sometimes sleep with the farmer's daughterbefore skedaddlingand always had some new gadget or innovative thing on offer, though these could just as often be a hoax.
Think of "The Music Man, "

Or, think of most of these characters, True enough, not all of them are Americansbut they are being told by an American for a mostly American audience, and, I think their stories are shaped

to fit the pattern of the Yankee Peddler.
He innovated for no good reason, causing a ruckus, before order was restored,

The model does not fit for Rene Blondlot and his NRays a story that is not obscure, either, nor is Blondlot forgotten, which is more about the blindness of the tooserious man.
In fact, he's undone by the Yankee sharp, It also doesn't work as well for another French man, Jean Paul Sudre, and his universal musical language, But so many of these others follow the tradition: Banvard, obviously, and Ireland Ephraim Bull and his Concord Grapes which story sounds like something Paul Harvey would have recounted the mysterious Psalamanazar Alfred Beach and his pneumatic tube, progenitor of the modern subway system A J Pleasanton and his blue glass panacea Delia Bacon and her heterodox theories about Shakespeare's playsactually written, she said, by her namesake, Francis Bacon and all those involved with the various space hoaxes of theth and earlyth centuries: luna civilizations and Martian canals.


The book is not so much a testament to failure and loss, but to the opposite impulse: gaining, even at the expenseperhaps especially at the expenseof others.
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