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Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations

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How one man corrected hundreds of modern misquotations infecting the Internet, our books, and our minds.

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.”

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3 thoughts on “Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations

  1. Meh What a disappointment this book was, although since I got it from Amazon for free as part of my Prime membership, I shouldn’t complain too much. As a librarian, I love the art of research, especially as it pertains to language. In this collection, the author sets the stage by explaining how he came to track down the derivation of familiar quotes, often debunking accepted wisdom, occasionally unable to get a definitive answer. I started the first case “Good artists copy; great artists…

  2. I lost interest Like a few other reviewers, I was very interested in the description of this book. Unfortunately, although the author seems to have done a ton of research in an attempt to get to the root of the sayings, the book is written in a dry style. I read several of the quotations, but quickly lost interest. I believe I would appreciated it more if I had been looking for a reference book. I am not sure about recommending it, because it would all depend upon the reader’s intentions. If it is just to…

  3. Great Kindle First selection… informative and entertaining Rarely do I see a non-fiction book as a Kindle First selection, even more rarely is it one that actually looks interesting to me. I usually go for the Mystery/Suspense/Thrillers but I switched it up this month. Everyone loves a good, thought-provoking quote, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has filled notebooks with some of their favorites. Between quotes and lyrics I must have filled up dozens of composition books in my youth. I found some cleaning recently and it’s really revealing to go…

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