Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World, (Paperback)

from mstrust

Most of the people in this collection tried so hard to succeed that you can't help but root for them, even knowing that being included in a book of this title, they failed. Well, that isn't entirely true. Ephraim Bull spent years cross-breeding and cultivating grapes until he created the Concord,...

from MiaCulpa

While the book promises biographies of obscure people, I had read about most of the people featured here before; indeed several of them, such as Robert Coates, Delia Bacon and Psalmanazar, are fixtures of books on eccentric people. What makes "Banvard's Folly" stand out from other studies of ecce...

from JohnMunsch

This was an intersting history of how you can become huge for a moment or perhaps even a decade and yet a hundred years later be completely forgotten because you didn't make an impact or at least not enough of one. It would be hard to read the tale of Banvard (the first chapter in the book is dev...

from Cheryl_in_CC_NV

1.5 stars. Neat idea, but Collins had not yet developed his voice, and so it is much too dry. I admit I did not read it carefully, but I did read at least one sentence from every page, and often much more than that.

from Gold_Gato

This was a quite lovely read, about forgotten people in barely forgotten times. Only in America would we consider these gentlemen and gentlewomen to be 'losers', simply because they had an idea that others stole or their achievements have been forgotten by each succeeding generation. Some of them...