We have a copy of Michael Farquhar's Bad Days in History: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year, which I had intended to read one day at a time over the course of 2021, but it was engrossing and I quickly got too far ahead (was at mid-March in mid-January), so I put it aside to pick up again in March, but forgot to put in a calendar reminder, and so here I am on December 31 trying to power through it.
It's... good, I guess? but I'm not entirely certain it's that much better than looking through the Wikipedia entries for "on this day". Part of my hesitation comes from the fact that entries vary from a couple sentences to a couple pages. I know they can't all be particularly detailed, because Farquhar is writing a sub-500 page book and not a 732 page book. And sometimes the short ones work well, like the day Joan of Arc's death sentence was nullified, 25 years after she was burned at the stake.
That sort of tale seems to fit the "Gleefully Grim" part of the subtitle, and the quote from the Washington Post's review on the front cover leans into this: "An upbeat catalog of defeats, faux pas[,**] and falls from grace that contributed to some very crummy moments." Similarly, the Portland Book Review*** quote on the back cover states, "A wonderful morbid and entertaining collection."
A lot of the entries are morbidly entertaining. Then there are entries like July 30, 1865, when Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to an asylum. This is not merely a morbidly entertaining "crummy moment", but the culmination of nearly 20 years of trying to get fellow doctors to wash their hands before examining patients -- especially in the obstetrics department. There are many more entries like this, which I think are important, but they are sobering tragedies, not "upbeat defeats".
** Fixing the lack of Oxford comma
*** Note that the full review is more measured; this is just a bad choice of quote for the book cover.
Alex, have you listened to The History of English podcast? I may not be reading as much as I once did, but I surely am listening to history podcasts, and this is my current fave:
ReplyDeletehttps://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
Every episode is like a fun-fact nugget. Like did you know that "ye" of "ye old tavern" was never supposed to be pronounced with a y? That it was the character "thorn" and it was mistaken as a y. It was always meant to have the "th" sound!
Happy 2022, old friend. :)