Edison's ghosts : the untold weirdness of history's greatest geniuses / Katie Spalding.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spalding, Katie, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eccentrics and eccentricities--Anecdotes.

Eccentrics and eccentricities.

Gifted persons--Anecdotes.

Gifted persons.

Genius--Anecdotes.

Genius.

Genre:

Anecdotes.

Biographies.

Humor.

Physical Description:

342 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2023.

Summary:

"Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius - but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." So begins Katie Spalding's spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there's probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn't. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition."--Amazon.com.

Contents:

The mathematical cult leader Pythagoras, and his incredibly stupid death

Confucius was an ugly nerd with low self-esteem

Never, ever hire Leonardo da Vinci

Galileo utterly fails to read the room

The entirely unbelievable life of Tycho Brahe

When René Descartes got baked

Isaac Newton and the Philosopher's Stone

Mozart uses his superstar status to tell us all to kiss his arse ... over and over again

Benjamin Franklin uses world-changing technology to prank friends, self

Émilie du Châtelet cares not for your social mores, and she will fight you in her underwear to prove it

Johann Christian Reil invents psychiatry and things get really weird really quickly

Napoleon Bonaparte's fluffiest foe

Lord Byron, the patron saint of fuckboys

Ada Lovelace's (husband's) family jewels

Galois hunting

John Couch Adams ignores his mail, loses Neptune

You really wouldn't want to hang out with Karl Marx

Charles Darwin: glutton; worm dad; murderer?

James Glaisher, the Victorian weatherman who nearly became an astronaut

Sigmund Freud used cocaine so much he thought numbers wanted to kill him

Arthur Conan Doyle gets pranked so hard he claims fairies exist

Thomas Edison's lesser-known invention: dial-a-ghost

Real-life supervillain Nicola Tesla takes the term "pigeon fancying" a bit too literally

Marie Curie defies all the odds to accidentally poison both herself and thousands of strangers

Albert Einstein: public nuisance, love rat

Kurt Gödel, the Disney princess who broke time

Maya Angelou, in: Stop! or my mom will shoot

Ernest Hemingway may have been the worst double agent ever

Yukio Mishima and the shortest, gayest fascist coup in history

NASA forgets about women, toilets and the metric system.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-332) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Altemus Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9780316529525

0316529524

OCLC:

1378722437