100 Mistakes That Changed History by Bill Fawcett, Berkley '10 paperback. $15, 387 pages, ISBN 042523665X.
This is a treasure for those who love history and, hey, even for those indifferent to it. Whether it be in the modern era, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Maginot Line, or from earlier eras, such as why the Aztecs greeted the Conquistadors with open arms or why the Caliphs in Baghdad spent themselves into bankruptcy, Bill Fawcett offers up 100 bite-sized chapters about how a variety of miscues caused empires to collapse or economies to crash. Editor Bill Fawcett has written more than 15 books and lives and works in Barrington, IL.
Writers Gone Wild -- The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes by Bill Peschel, Perigee '10 paperback, $14.95, 257 pages, ISBN #0399536183. Index, bibliography, unillustrated.
Bill Peschel offers up a few choice tidbits to entice his readers, such as "The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S.J. Perelman's marriage (and run off with his wife!), why Richard Ford spat on a book critic, the night a drunken Dylan Thomas dodged machine-gun bullets, why Ernest Hemingway fought a book critics, a modernist poet, and Nazi subs (but not at the same time); and the near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico. Bill Peschel keeps a 5,000-book library at his home in Hershey, PA and edits news articles and designs pages for the Harrisburg Patriot-News.
Expanding the American Mind -- Books and the Popularization of Knowledge by Beth Luey, UMass. Press '10 paperback. $24.95, 218 pages, ISBN #1558498176. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.
Time was when serious nonfiction works in such fields as history, psychology and the sciences were the purview of academics alone. But, as author Beth Luey writes, such phenomena as increased literacy, education, and university politics have brought with them an increased interest in popularization. And greater interest translates into greater willingness of publishers to offer works to the popular market. Now, it is commonplace for the NPR crowd and others outside the academy to read such writers as Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawkings, Daniel Boorstin and Robert Coles. And all to the good, we'd say. Beth Luey, author of Handbook for Academic Authors, directed the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University for a quarter-century.
