The Pessimist’s Guide To History, by Stuart Flexner with Doris Flexner
There is a downside to reading a book like this one, and that is the fact that although the various stories are told with wit and sarcastic humor, and though the book has a suitably gloomy but adorable cartoon on the cover, the fact is that reading about the various disasters, which are thrown together with no sense of proportion, get rather monotonous after awhile. One reads the book, thinking of all the disasters that were not included, like the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, or the full extent of the Armenian genocide during World War I, while wondering why the author spent a great deal of time talking about fires in theaters and earthquakes and train wrecks and the like, considering each disaster to be equal to any other, spending as much time on Bhopal as the Holocaust. It may be a bad thing to be gloomy and pessimistic [1], or so used to reading about horrors, that the brief description by the author leaves one without feeling, moving quickly on to the next disaster without skipping a beat.
In terms of its contents, the book is about 400 pages, divided somewhat unequally into a few sections. The main part of the book consists of a mostly chronologically organized set of various types of disasters and blunders that would tend to demonstrate the writer as a pessimist about humanity and its behaviors, whether that is fighting over religion, or creating technology, or in being arrogant enough to assume that a building is fireproof, that nice guys are what they claim to be, or that a ship is unsinkable. The various chronicle entries are shown with a year, a title, and a summary extending from a couple of lines to a couple of pages before the author moves on to the next one. After the 360 pages of such disasters or so, the author gives a very short bibliography and then a topically organized list of the various disasters spoken of in the book, divided into such categories as air crashes, fires and explosions, and storms, among others. Although the book is somewhat lengthy by the standards of most books of its kind in popular history, the book could have been far greater in size given the amount of human error and natural disaster to choose from over the lengthy course of human history.
Although the book clearly meets its goal of being a compendium of catastrophes, barbarities, massacres, and mayhem, there are still some things to be critical about besides the fact that so much bad news is rather numbing after a while to some readers. For one, the author has a clear presentist bias. Although the back cover talks about three historical examples, about 3/4 of the book contains material written about the period after 1800, and about 2/3 of the material looks at the twentieth century, only going up to 1991 or so. Having a more equitable spread of discussions would have made the book a little bit less tedious when getting to the modern period after having blown through thousands of years of human history, and also the creation of the universe and the destruction of the dinosaurs (but not any of the other mass extinction events of history). In addition, the book occasionally gets matters wrong, whether that is one case where the author discusses the destruction of the Alexandria library out of place, and another case where the author misplaces the Hussite wars by two centuries in history, saying they lasted from 1619 to 1635 (which was the Bohemian aspect of the Thirty Years’ War), rather than in the 1400’s. It is likely this very incomplete mastery of history that leads the author to focus on contemporary history in the vast majority of the book, although it makes this book far less exhaustive and complete than it would have been otherwise.
[1] No one has ever accused me of being anything less than gloomy in my own historical research:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/more-was-lost-at-mohacs/
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