Читать книгу The Book Of Lists - David Wallechinsky - Страница 10

In our society a married woman loses part of her identity through taking her husband’s family name. Should her children happen to become famous, her husband’s family is immortalised while her own family is consigned to oblivion. (Picasso is one of the few famous men who chose to use his mother’s name, partly because it was less common than Ruiz, his father’s name.) It seems fitting to turn the spotlight, for once, upon the maternal branch responsible for contributing half the genetic endowment of the world’s immortals and mortals.

1 William Arden (Shakespeare)

2 Isaac Ayscough (Newton)

3 Johann Sebastian Lämmerhirt (Bach)

4 George Ball (Washington)

5 Thomas Randolph (Jefferson)

6 Johann Wolfgang Textor (von Goethe)

7 Wolfgang Amadeus Pertl (Mozart)

8 Napoleon Ramolino (Bonaparte)

9 Ludwig Keverich (van Beethoven)

10 Abraham Hanks (Lincoln)

11 Charles Wedgwood (Darwin)

12 Charles Barrow (Dickens)

13 Karl Pressburg (Marx)

14 Sigmund Nathanson (Freud)

15 George Bernard Gurly (Shaw)

16 Winston Jerome (Churchill)

17 Albert Koch (Einstein)

18 Charlie Hill (Chaplin)

19 Ernest Hall (Hemingway)

20 Frank Garaventi (Sinatra)

21 Mick Scutts (Jagger)

22 Sylvester Labofish (Stallone)

23 Stephen Pillsbury (King)

24 Arnold Jedrny (Schwarzenegger)

25 Michael Scruse (Jackson)

26 Osama Ghanem (bin Laden)

27 Tiger Punsawad (Woods)

– M.B.T.