Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present
Christopher Hitchens, Adam Begley, Edward Sorel
Language: English
Pages: 38
ISBN: 2:00154840
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sometimes all we have is the courage of our convictions. But not all convictions are created equal. In fact, some are downright delusional. And once a foolish notion sinks its teeth into the famous or the powerful, look out--the impact can have profound consequences for the rest of us. So it's nothing short of gratifying when our most bullheaded and self-righteous leading lights insist on getting their way only to be proven egregiously embarrassingly wrong. From politicians to pontiffs, movie stars to moguls, and artists to inventors, Certitude presents short biographical sketches of notoriously stubborn individuals who were certain they were right--with laughable, disturbing, and often disastrous results.
Earning a place among the greatest historical and contemporary bullheads are:
•Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who failed to place his own vanities on the bonfire.
•Carry A. Nation, the saloon smasher who didn't have a temperate bone in her teetotaling body.
•Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, who lacked the deductive reasoning he bestowed on his own creation.
•Joseph Stalin, the hard-line Soviet leader who had a soft spot after all.
•Madonna, the queen of pop, who isn't just a material girl: She's embraced Kabbalah and the doctrine of reincarnation--in other words, she'll be back!
Informative, irreverent, and brilliantly illustrated by the caricaturist Edward Sorel, Certitude is a book for our time.
one of the members of that race they are devils.” Delia Salter Bacon (1811–59) As Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked after telling the tale of Delia Bacon: “This has been too sad a story.” Brilliant, penniless, and therefore obliged to live by her wits, Delia Bacon was eventually betrayed by her own cleverness. Convinced that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a conclave of Elizabethan luminaries presided over by Francis Bacon (no relation), she believed, moreover, that the plays were
descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.” “It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rock.” “I would rather begin with God and reason down than begin with a piece of dirt and reason up.” “If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education.” Remember the Scopes Trial? (One wag had it that Clarence Darrow “made a monkey out of” Bryan.) Five days after the verdict,
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Begley, Adam. Certitude A profusely illlustrated guide to blockheads and bullheads, past & present / Adam Begley; illustrations by Edward Sorel.—1st ed. 1. Biography—Anecdotes. 2. World history—Anecdotes. 3. Certainty—Anecdotes. I. Sorel, Edward, 1929–II. Title. CT105.B39 2009 909—dc22 2008051786 eISBN: 978-0-307-45981-7 v3.0
appearance, and a bad case of stage fright. And yet his lectures and “circulars” (not surprisingly, he preferred the term “circular” to “pamphlet”) were convincing enough to earn him a minor celebrity. Despite poor health and his dread of crowds, he lectured in frontier towns and across New England; the aim of all his relentless proselytizing was to launch an expedition to the Arctic, where he believed one could gain access to the worlds within our world. Though ridiculed by scientists and the
eleven, when they met at their Paris lycée, he and Ludovic Halévy were inseparable; thirty years later, Degas was still having dinner at the Halévys once a week, and lunch just as often. The Halévys were Jewish; Degas was not, and in 1894, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted, a fifty-year friendship came to an abrupt end. All of France divided into two camps: the Dreyfusards, who believed in the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery officer convicted of treason on trumped-up charges