Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
Written by Garson O'Toole
Narrated by Mel Foster
2.5/5
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About this audiobook
”Extensive and brilliant investigations…a tour de force of detective work…Mr. O’Toole is a beacon of accuracy who should inspire all readers who prefer their facts real rather than phony.” —Wall Street Journal
Everywhere you look, you’ll find viral quotable wisdom attributed to icons ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, from Cicero to Woody Allen. But more often than not, these attributions are false.
Garson O’Toole—the Internet’s foremost investigator into the dubious origins of our most repeated quotations, aphorisms, and everyday sayings—collects his efforts into a first-ever encyclopedia of corrective popular history. Containing an enormous amount of original research, this delightful compendium presents information previously unavailable to readers, writers, and scholars. It also serves as the first careful examination of what causes misquotations and how they spread across the globe.
Using the massive expansion in online databases as well as old-fashioned gumshoe archival digging, O’Toole provides a fascinating study of our modern abilities to find and correct misinformation. As Carl Sagan did not say, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Garson O'Toole
Garson O’Toole has researched the origins of familiar quotations for years at www.quoteinvestigator.com. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, and many other publications.
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Reviews for Hemingway Didn't Say That
33 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5For the most part a pretty boring book. Perhaps interesting for some, but certainly not me. I learned nothing of any importance and there was little of interest to want to seek any further knowledge regarding any of the subjects investigated. All in all a disappointment.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Collection of investigations into the actual provenance of often misattributed quotes, including some search for their predecessors.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5O'Toole is to be lauded for his research in debunking errant attributions of quotes, but at book length, it does become a bit tedious. If the quotes themselves were more interesting, this might not be the case. He also shows that while it is quite easy to prove that someone didn't say something (at least not originally), it is very difficult to pin down who actually did say it, or something quite like it first. The research here is quite convincing so far as it goes, however. I'll never look at a quote with as much trust again!