{"id":1849,"date":"2010-12-30T09:35:17","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T13:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/?p=1849"},"modified":"2010-12-30T09:42:10","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T13:42:10","slug":"thirteen-people-who-didn%e2%80%99t-change-the-world-by-paul-collins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/?p=1849","title":{"rendered":"Thirteen People Who Didn\u2019t Change the World, by Paul Collins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>History is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There\u2019s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein.\u00a0 But what about the losers? Happily, there\u2019s Paul Collins\u2014a great and, I think, under-appreciated writer\u2014who in <em>Banvard\u2019s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn&#8217;t Change the World<\/em>, brings to life a group of people who were famous in their own day, but for various reasons have been completely forgotten. The best-known (if that\u2019s the right word) of Collins\u2019 anti-heroes is Delia Bacon, who was renowned on two continents for her brilliantly erudite lectures, but went mad, and in the process invented the Francis Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare&#8217;s-plays theory. (She and Francis were unrelated, though late in her life she seems to have forgotten this.) Martin Farquhar Tupper was a famous writer of revoltingly treacly Victorian poetry, bizarrely much admired by Walt Whitman. \u00a0Ren\u00e9 Blondlot was a brilliant scientist who believed that he had discovered N-rays. Collins manages to evoke sympathy for his hapless protagonists, though it&#8217;s perhaps not unmixed with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nCQGQ5qBQTA\" target=\"_blank\">schadenfreude<\/a>. Still, in this deeply fun book, they finally have the last word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>History is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There\u2019s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein.\u00a0 But what about the losers? Happily, there\u2019s Paul Collins\u2014a great and, I think, under-appreciated writer\u2014who in Banvard\u2019s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn&#8217;t Change the World, brings to life a group of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,4],"class_list":["post-1849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-biography","tag-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1849"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorinkleinman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}