History isn't always made by great armies
colliding or by great civilizations rising or falling. Sometimes it's made when
a chauffeur takes a wrong turn, a scientist forgets to clean up his lab, or a
drunken soldier gets a bit rowdy. That's the kind of history you'll find in The Greatest Stories Never Told. This
is history candy -- the good stuff. (Amazon)
Reviewed by Amy Finnegan - Writer, Reader, Bookshop Talk Host
I don’t fall in love with a lot of nonfiction books,
but when I do, I really love them.
Such is the case with The Greatest
Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy. Each
story is told in just two pages, with an average of only four paragraphs and a
couple of photos, and yet I always finish each tale thinking “Holy cow, that’s so
cool,” or “That is plain crazy!” or most often, with a simple, “Wow.”
I’d already heard bits and pieces of about half of
the stories and was delighted to be reminded of the details. But even as often
as I read history books (which is the majority of the nonfiction that I read),
I was completely oblivious to several of them. Here are just a few teasers:
Do you remember that in the third Pirates of the
Caribbean movie, one of the pirate leaders was a woman? Turns out, this detail
was based on fact, and she was no ordinary pirate. Hsi Kai was the most
successful pirate of all time, ruling the South China Sea “with an iron hand,
terrorizing shipping, attacking seaside villages, and defeating every naval
force sent to intercept her.” In the early 1800s, she commanded more than 1,000
ships with 50,000 pirates—more than twice the size of the famed Spanish Armada,
and in a time when the U.S. Navy had just 5000 men. She retired undefeated,
kept all of her loot, and lived peacefully to an old age.
Care to guess what happened to any of her pirates who
took advantage of a female captive, even if the woman agreed to it? You’ll have
to read that part for yourself.
Another
fascinating tidbit: I grew up being told stories about the legendary Pony Express,
when in reality, it was “an impractical, money-losing business that went
bankrupt in little more than a year.” The notoriously dangerous enterprise was
made obsolete almost immediately by the much less expensive, and instantaneous,
telegraph. But at least it gave Buffalo Bill some good material for his Wild
West shows.
Edwin Booth |
To wrap
this up, I’ll quote exactly from one of my favorite stories from this book:
“One of America’s most famous actors stood
on a train platform in Jersey City. He was among a crowd of people about to get
on board a train. As the crowd pressed forward to enter one of the coaches, the
train unexpectedly started with a jolt, rolling a few feet before it stopped.
The actor saw a young man lose his balance, and begin to fall helplessly
between the platform and the moving car.
Thinking quickly, the actor reached down
and grabbed the young fellow by the collar, pulling him to safety. The grateful
young man recognized his celebrity savior, ‘whose face was of course well known
to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by
name.’
It is only later that the two men
recognized the haunting irony.
Robert Todd Lincoln |
The actor was Edwin Booth. His younger
brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated President Lincoln the following
spring. And the young man whose life he saved?
Robert Todd Lincoln—Abraham Lincoln’s son.”
As I said
earlier, wow.
Read this
book. It truly will “astonish” you.
Market: Nonfiction
Language: Mild
Sensuality: Mild
Violence: Mild/Moderate
Mature
Themes: Nothing worse than the details told in high school history books
Book Formats:
1 comment:
Wow, that is such a cool story about Edwin Booth and Robert Todd Lincoln! Gave me chills...and I'm dying to read more about Hsi Kai. I love pirate stuff.
Terrific review, Amy! I'll definitely be reading this book!
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