Critical Mick

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The Pessimist's Guide to History: An Irresistible Compendium of Catastrophes, Barbarities, Massacres, and Mayhem-from 14 Billion Years Ago to 2007
by Doris Flexner and Stuart Berg Flexner
Harper Paperbacks, 2008

History is Most Intolerable

Narky little naysayer that I am, The Pessimist's Guide to History has been on my To Be Read stack for more than a decade. An annual countdown of all the worst natural and man-made disasters since time began! That'll make me feel better the next time I receive my Amazon.com Associates statement. "You did not earn any referral fees during the last payment period." Huh! Well, at least I went another month without catching the Black Death.

Over roughly 500 pages, Doris Flexner and Stuart Berg Flexner summarize the worst avalanches, assassinations, epidemics, explosions, tidal waves, train wrecks, nuclear accidents and natural selections known to man. The title promises a guide, but it's a dad-blammit hornswagglin' lie concocted by some conniving marketing varmint. This ain't nothing but a list, with little jokes worse than what's found in a Christmas cracker closing each entry. "Obviously, the crew needed just a little more training." (page 244) Gol, I bet that got the families of those 133 people killed aboard the Morro Castle slappin' their knees.

History nerd that I am, the Flexner's irreverent catalogue of cataclysms still contains many interesting entries that I had not even known about. For instance: immediately after the end of the US Civil War in April 1865, an explosion destroyed the steamboat Sultana. Aboard were more than two thousand Union soldiers who had just been released from Confederate POW camps. More men perished that day than were lost on the Titanic. Another example: in 27 AD, a Roman stadium built on the cheap by shady contractors collapsed, killing tens of thousands. Even worse, in 88 BC, one hundred thousand Romans were ethnically cleansed by Mithridates VI Eupator in Asia Minor and Syria. Large scale genocide dating back more than two thousand years. Atrocities, landslides, jihads, serial killings, plagues, munitions ships or chemical factories exploding... huge tolls, all largely forgotten.

I got hooked and earned a BA in History from one of the oldest universities in America. (Useless piece of paper to approach the job market with, but a passable foundation for a lifelong history nerd.)

So here's the recommendation of one who has heard many of the screwed-up world's most outrageous stories: The Pessimist's Guide to History is an excellent educational prompt of a gift for teenagers who have an interest in why the world is screwed. It's also great bathroom reading.

Like George Stimpson's A Book About A Thousand Things, The Pessimist's Guide to History is compelling material that is easy to dip in and out of. Some entries (Paris Hilton and Monica Lewinsky-?) are bizarrely out of place, but there's plenty to catch the interest, prompt further reading, and feel downright cheery about in comparison.

powder your face with sunshine? Skin cancer most likely.

Critical Mick says: As breezy as a history can be when recording steamship disasters, genocides and typhoons, The Pessimist's Guide to History is going to stay on my bookshelf, until the damn thing collapses.

Zombentino, baby!

All those narky, ill-mannered weasels on Goodreads have already written 16 reviews of this Pessimists book, all of which are probably so superior to Mick's that they make his analysis above look like puke coughed up from a diseased goat.

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2009 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

Irate, huh? Managed to piss off another one? Direct your hatemail to mick @ mickhalpin dot com.

This Page Was Last Updated On 26 December, 2009.