Fake Heroes: Ten False Icons and How they Altered the Course of History

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Wesley Autrey was a 52-year-old construction worker in New York and in January 2007, he was taking his two younger daughters across New York to their mother's house before he went on to work. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Exploring everything from Captain Scott's reckless hunt for glory and Andy Warhol's flagrant thievery to Coco Chanel's murky Nazi past, Otto English dives into the hidden lives of some of history's most recognisable names. Having exposed some of the greatest lies ever told in Fake History , journalist Otto English turns his attention to some of history's biggest (and most beloved) figures. I think if truth be told, it is at heart nothing but a tale of human failings and the skulduggery carried out in the name of propagandists and commercial interests.Instead, he happened to have a face that had icon written all over it and ended up incessantly emblazoned on middle-class bedsit walls and t-shirts across the world, as much of a capitalist consumerist brand as Coca Cola. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished.

Synthesizing the work of thinkers including Freud, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Einstein, delineating the enticing strategies of characters throughout history, The Art of Seduction is a comprehensive guide to getting what we want - any way we can. This author is a hero of mine and the intelligence and wit in his writing has defined the post-2016 EU referendum madness for me. Captain Scott became an explorer not due to any passion for adventure and scientific discovery, but purely because arctic explorers were the rockstars of the world at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones. As I show her inside, I notice her eyes grow wide as she takes in our spacious hallway, and the big squashy sofas that we all used to pile on.His upbringing was quite well to do, and such were the class divisons in the Argentina of his day that people of his class thought nothing of the teenage Guevara routinely raping the family maid. Some of them weren't particularly competent, and achieved wealth and fame largely on the back of the efforts of others around them. They overthrew the corrupt and repressive Batista regime in Cuba, and at this point Guevara could be described was a hero, he says. It's taken me a while to get to reviewing this properly because I wanted to make sure I got everything completely correct fact-wise and also because I wanted to make sure my own biases wouldn't come into play too much.

Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. Instead, some of the most interesting sections of “Fake Heroes” are where Otto English shifts from iconoclasm against his ten chosen historical figures and focuses on the nature of mythologising and how – and why – society manufactures its heroes.The first group are all astronauts, about to leave Earth on a one-way interstellar colonization mission. Recently shortlisted for the Great Reads Award, this debut YA novel is funny, warm hearted and encouraging for anyone who feels they just don’t fit ‘the mould’.