Profiles in Contrast
Sophie Manners delivers her thoughts on the life and times, traits and exploits of a prominent historical figure and then contrasts that individual with a mystery modern-age figure who is similar in the arc of their life, their personal credo, and how they have been treated by history. She begins with a brief biographical sketch, followed by a tease in which she describes the modern era contrasting figure before revealing their identity. She then explains her reasoning for her choice and contrasts the pair before concluding with summary comments and a personal statement about which one she finds the more compelling figure and why.
Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay
Profiles in Contrast
Latest Episodes
Adam Smith and the Book that Remade the World
He spent fourteen years in a small Scottish coastal town writing a nine-hundred-page book that created the discipline of economics, coined the phrase "invisible hand," and has been invoked in support of almost every economic policy position sin...
Euclid and the Architecture of Certainty
He produced the most widely read mathematics textbook in history. It has been continuously in print for approximately two thousand three hundred years. It shaped the thinking of Newton, Galileo, Einstein and every mathematician who ...
Sun Tzu and the Art of Not Fighting
He may or may not have existed. The text attributed to him was probably written, revised and compiled over more than a century. The story of how he proved his military theories by having two of the king's concubines executed is almo...
Catherine the Great and the Empire She Made Her Own
She arrived in Russia at sixteen as Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, daughter of a minor Prussian prince nobody had heard of, speaking no Russian, with nothing to recommend her beyond an acceptable lineage and the specific quality of ambition that wou...
Philip Wylie and the Prophet Nobody Wanted to Hear
He wrote the prototype for Superman in 1930 and got no credit. He warned about nuclear war before Hiroshima and was put under house arrest by Army Intelligence for knowing too much. He coined "Momism" in 1942 and was denounced as a ...
