Friday, January 22, 2010

Reasoning fail

Meet Mr. Robert Stevenson, a well-known civil engineer. Yesterday I saw a picture of him in the National Portrait Gallery and got suspicious immediately about the ebook I had downloaded a while ago and hasn't read yet.

The roots of my suspicion were in the fact of that autobiographic book having a self-explaining title Records of a Family of Engineers, stating Robert Louis Stevenson as an author. Of course I had an idea that an autobiography with that title much more likely belongs to an engineer than to a writer, who could be placed on the web page instead of him by mistake (because of him being more famous) - so I was glad to discover a kind of mishmash with names.

How naïve. The author of The Treasure Island turned out to be Robert Stevenson's grandson. His father was an engineer too, so that was the right and simplest reason of giving such a title to his autobiography.

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