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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.… (more)
User reviews
Other people in the book include the man who built a precursor to the modern subway, another who spent his life trying to get his international musical language to catch on, and the stories of William Ireland and Robert Coates. Ireland, a neglected teenager, forged Shakespeare's signature and gave his "discovery" to his father as a way to gain approval. His father's regard for the boy's treasure hunting rose to the point that William was able to pen several poems and plays and pass them off as newly found works by Shakespeare.
Coates was another who adored Shakespeare, but he wanted to be an actor. He arrived in Bath in 1809, and made a spectacle of himself by adorning his clothes, shoes and cane with diamonds. His carriage was in the shape of a giant clam. And he put on performances of Romeo and Juliet at the local theater, but in his shows Romeo was the only star. His death scene would go on and on, and he would even get up and repeat it, as the audience would encourage him to do. Coates could fill the theater night after night as everyone loved to watch his horrible acting, and he took their heckles for encouragement.
The title derives from John Banvard, who created grand works of art on rollout canvas, which drew standing-room only crowds in the 19th century. He shone before the age of cinema, which basically made his type of work obsolete. My favorite story was that of Rene Blondlot, a French scientist who 'discovered' the N-Ray, which really was nothing but some changes of light prisms. He believed deeply that he had discovered something extraordinary, and was subsequently laughed out of existence when his theory was disproved.
Here's to the 'losers'...bless them all.
Book Season = YearRound (enjoy!)
What makes "Banvard's Folly" stand out from other studies of
I'm hoping for a sequel.
It would be hard to read the tale of Banvard (the first chapter in the book is
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