Rating: 
Summary: Never Boring, History that Keeps You Wanting More
Review: Talk about a timely book. Tally takes a "What if?" approach to pivotal moments in American history and helped me understand the significance of people, politics, and cultural movements in a way that left me longing for more. He leads up to a particular moment by setting you down in the midst of the historic context and its key players and chronicles what lead up to that watershed moment. He then counter poses the question, What if the outcome had been different? And then explores how our national character or world history might have been altered if a decision or circumstance had gone the other way. One of my favorite college football teams is headed for the Rose Bowl in January, and here Tally discusses how Teddy Roosevelt nearly used the bully pulpit of the presidency to abolish that sport. What is even more fascinating is considering how influential college athletics have been in making the University accessible and hence supported by lots of people who might have otherwise cared less. In today's political climate of close elections and missed presidential opportunities, Tally has some wonderful chapters on what might have happened if Tilden who had won the popular vote had defeated Hayes, if Dewey really had defeated Truman, and if Nixon had not resigned but had been impeached. Each chapter seems so timely, and yet opens a chapter of American history that most of us have overlooked or forgotten. There is the usual stuff about military defeats that might have been victories or victories that were almost defeats--the kind of stuff you used to hear vigorously debated at the barber shop. And even though I eat this stuff up like candy, you wonder, What's the point? But Tally takes it a step further and helps the reader explore the larger consequences for the future of our nation, not just the outcome of a battle or war. What I appreciate most about this book was the diversity of subject material. It's not just politics and battle but also culture, sports, ideas, and technology. All of it is grist for Tally's thorough research and nimble imagination. My one disappointment with the book comes when I am just getting into the life and times of person and decision, e.g. Andrew Carnegie and his decision to sell off his Steel Company, when--before I know it--the chapter is done. I look back, and yes, I've been reading for some time, but the way it's brought to life makes me want to continue my reading. It would have been helpful if Tally had a selected bibliography of where I could go to go to find more information on a particular historic hingepoint. I want to know where I can go to find other authors, who like Steve Tally, can make history accessible, enjoyable AND meaningful. This is a book that would make a great Christmas gift (I've already recommended it to friends), but it would also be a wonderful text for high school American history classes. It would help them see that history doesn't have to be boring in order to teach us about our past and point us to our future.
Rating:
Summary: Never Boring, History that Keeps You Wanting More
Review: Talk about a timely book. Tally takes a "What if?" approach to pivotal moments in American history and helped me understand the significance of people, politics, and cultural movements in a way that left me longing for more. He leads up to a particular moment by setting you down in the midst of the historic context and its key players and chronicles what lead up to that watershed moment. He then counter poses the question, What if the outcome had been different? And then explores how our national character or world history might have been altered if a decision or circumstance had gone the other way. One of my favorite college football teams is headed for the Rose Bowl in January, and here Tally discusses how Teddy Roosevelt nearly used the bully pulpit of the presidency to abolish that sport. What is even more fascinating is considering how influential college athletics have been in making the University accessible and hence supported by lots of people who might have otherwise cared less. In today's political climate of close elections and missed presidential opportunities, Tally has some wonderful chapters on what might have happened if Tilden who had won the popular vote had defeated Hayes, if Dewey really had defeated Truman, and if Nixon had not resigned but had been impeached. Each chapter seems so timely, and yet opens a chapter of American history that most of us have overlooked or forgotten. There is the usual stuff about military defeats that might have been victories or victories that were almost defeats--the kind of stuff you used to hear vigorously debated at the barber shop. And even though I eat this stuff up like candy, you wonder, What's the point? But Tally takes it a step further and helps the reader explore the larger consequences for the future of our nation, not just the outcome of a battle or war. What I appreciate most about this book was the diversity of subject material. It's not just politics and battle but also culture, sports, ideas, and technology. All of it is grist for Tally's thorough research and nimble imagination. My one disappointment with the book comes when I am just getting into the life and times of person and decision, e.g. Andrew Carnegie and his decision to sell off his Steel Company, when--before I know it--the chapter is done. I look back, and yes, I've been reading for some time, but the way it's brought to life makes me want to continue my reading. It would have been helpful if Tally had a selected bibliography of where I could go to go to find more information on a particular historic hingepoint. I want to know where I can go to find other authors, who like Steve Tally, can make history accessible, enjoyable AND meaningful. This is a book that would make a great Christmas gift (I've already recommended it to friends), but it would also be a wonderful text for high school American history classes. It would help them see that history doesn't have to be boring in order to teach us about our past and point us to our future.
Rating: 
Summary: Sloppy History Gives No Alternative to a Low Rating
Review: The historical background is poor and Tally's slopiness in reasoning is clear. In the chapter on history without the Morse telegraph Tally ignores the many other electrical telegraphs. Morse's code gave his telegraph some clear advantages . But is implausible that given the many alternative electric telegraphs( no alternative electric telegraph would have existed 20 years later on the eve of the Civil War. It is even more implasable that the railroad would have been the fastest way of sending messages in 1861 given that other telegraphic signalling systems (using semaphores ) had been in use in France since Nepoleon. Some such systems would have been pressed into wide use to operate railroads if somehow electric telegaphs were not invented. Railroads were in fact closely wedded to telegraphs which were needed to dispatch the information for them to run safely Other nonsense is abundant. Tally's account of the original scheme for electing vice presidents omitts the two votes possessed by each elector and mistates the nature of the crisis in 1800 which was caused by the failure of the Republicans to coordinate their votes by arranging for one elector NOT to vote for Burr. Tally imagines that the provision for the election of the second highesr vote getter for Vice President would not have been fixed even though if lead repeatedly into disaster. In reality all it needed was one Burr under the US saddle to promote a fix before the next election. I had hoped to give this book to my daughter to spice her year in HS American History instead I shall be hiding it from her.
Rating:
Summary: Sloppy History Gives No Alternative to a Low Rating
Review: The historical background is poor and Tally's slopiness in reasoning is clear. In the chapter on history without the Morse telegraph Tally ignores the many other electrical telegraphs. Morse's code gave his telegraph some clear advantages . But is implausible that given the many alternative electric telegraphs( no alternative electric telegraph would have existed 20 years later on the eve of the Civil War. It is even more implasable that the railroad would have been the fastest way of sending messages in 1861 given that other telegraphic signalling systems (using semaphores ) had been in use in France since Nepoleon. Some such systems would have been pressed into wide use to operate railroads if somehow electric telegaphs were not invented. Railroads were in fact closely wedded to telegraphs which were needed to dispatch the information for them to run safely Other nonsense is abundant. Tally's account of the original scheme for electing vice presidents omitts the two votes possessed by each elector and mistates the nature of the crisis in 1800 which was caused by the failure of the Republicans to coordinate their votes by arranging for one elector NOT to vote for Burr. Tally imagines that the provision for the election of the second highesr vote getter for Vice President would not have been fixed even though if lead repeatedly into disaster. In reality all it needed was one Burr under the US saddle to promote a fix before the next election. I had hoped to give this book to my daughter to spice her year in HS American History instead I shall be hiding it from her.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Counterfactual Scenarios
Review: The sense I got when I read the "might have beens" in this book was that God seemed to be watching over the development of America--the securing of our independence in the eighteenth century and that we didn't self-destruct or fragment in the nineteenth. That thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard could break from Britain was deemed highly improbable, and it took a lot of providence to bring it about.
The one scenario that I thought was WAY off base was the 1992 election--there is no way that Bush would have beaten Clinton if he had dropped Dan Quayle from the ticket in favor of Colin Powell.
All in all, an enjoyable read, and a reason to be thankful that things didn't turn out as badly for America as they might have.
Rating:
Summary: Un-Challenging and Un-Creative
Review: This book is almost too easy, and the author has put in very little effort in his quest to offer thought-provoking scenarios of alternative history. He is a competent historian, and offers well-researched treatises on historical events and how they really happened. Unfortunately, the second half of each chapter, in which he attempts to get creative and speculate on what could have been, are where Steve Tally shows real weaknesses as a writer. Most of his "what-if" scenarios are not very creative at all, and fail to challenge your perceptions of the forces of history, which happens to be what he's trying to achieve. Notable exceptions are the chapter speculating on what would have happened to Bill Gates if the hadn't made an early business deal with IBM, and what would have become of Dan Quayle if Bush had dropped him from the presidential ticket.
Rating:
Summary: Refreshingly academic alternate history
Review: This book is in a slightly different class than most recent alternate history (or "counterfactual history," as the author calls it). The book is an anthology, but all the stories were written by the same author, Steve Tally. From his writing, I would have guessed that Mr. Tally is a history professor, and a pretty lively one, but he is in fact a professional writer whose credits include as much hard science as history. Nevertheless, his grasp of American history is impressive, and enhances his book's quality. The book takes twenty-eight "what if" scenarios and plays them out: What if the early United States had kept the Articles of Confederation? What if President T. Roosevelt had carried out his threat of outlawing the fledgling sport of American football? What if Nixon had fought his impeachment until the bitter end? What if IBM had written its early personal-computer code in-house instead of hiring Microsoft? The answers are fascinating, but plausible. As the author's introductory note explains, "I tried to make the counterfactual scenarios plausible. Adolf Hitler doesn't step into a time machine to join Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg . . . . [T]he counterfactuals are based on the decisions of human beings, not on acts of God. . . . Focusing on decisions allows us to second-guess those decisions, and second-guessing is always good sport." Looking past the implicit dig at "The Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove (a very good book, in my opinion), Mr. Tally lives up to his promise of plausibility: each chapter opens with an actual history lesson that sets the stage for the alternate-history story, then closes with a discussion of the sources and historical analogies that were used in constructing the story. For example, the chapter about the early United States keeping the Articles of Confederation, "America Scraps Its Constitution," plays out an interesting storyline whose facts are partly drawn (as the chapter later explains) from the Confederate States' experiment with a decentralized national government in the 1860s. It may be a drawback for some readers that the stories tend to be a little dry and academic, as if the book was a real history textbook rather than a novel. For me, however, the academic tone gives the book a certain charm that only enhances its interest. The stories actually engaged me as I tried drawing on my own knowledge of history to figure out where they were heading. For those readers who are seriously interested in second-guessing Mr. Tally's second guesses, he recently (Feb. 2001) set up a website for such a discussion, which he mentions in his introductory note. This book got me thinking, it educated me, and it was fun.
Rating:
Summary: Refreshingly academic alternate history
Review: This book is in a slightly different class than most recent alternate history (or "counterfactual history," as the author calls it). The book is an anthology, but all the stories were written by the same author, Steve Tally. From his writing, I would have guessed that Mr. Tally is a history professor, and a pretty lively one, but he is in fact a professional writer whose credits include as much hard science as history. Nevertheless, his grasp of American history is impressive, and enhances his book's quality. The book takes twenty-eight "what if" scenarios and plays them out: What if the early United States had kept the Articles of Confederation? What if President T. Roosevelt had carried out his threat of outlawing the fledgling sport of American football? What if Nixon had fought his impeachment until the bitter end? What if IBM had written its early personal-computer code in-house instead of hiring Microsoft? The answers are fascinating, but plausible. As the author's introductory note explains, "I tried to make the counterfactual scenarios plausible. Adolf Hitler doesn't step into a time machine to join Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg . . . . [T]he counterfactuals are based on the decisions of human beings, not on acts of God. . . . Focusing on decisions allows us to second-guess those decisions, and second-guessing is always good sport." Looking past the implicit dig at "The Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove (a very good book, in my opinion), Mr. Tally lives up to his promise of plausibility: each chapter opens with an actual history lesson that sets the stage for the alternate-history story, then closes with a discussion of the sources and historical analogies that were used in constructing the story. For example, the chapter about the early United States keeping the Articles of Confederation, "America Scraps Its Constitution," plays out an interesting storyline whose facts are partly drawn (as the chapter later explains) from the Confederate States' experiment with a decentralized national government in the 1860s. It may be a drawback for some readers that the stories tend to be a little dry and academic, as if the book was a real history textbook rather than a novel. For me, however, the academic tone gives the book a certain charm that only enhances its interest. The stories actually engaged me as I tried drawing on my own knowledge of history to figure out where they were heading. For those readers who are seriously interested in second-guessing Mr. Tally's second guesses, he recently (Feb. 2001) set up a website for such a discussion, which he mentions in his introductory note. This book got me thinking, it educated me, and it was fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Spice, but no meat!
Review: This book is neither a Turtledove-style alternative-history-novel, nor a "Virtual History" speculation by Niall Ferguson, but a collection of after-dinner mind-games. Pieces from American history with a short speculative "what if?" tale added for spice. Their style is that of a journalist's report, not that of a historian or novelist. This makes for easy reading, perhaps suitable for a transatlantic flight but not something to spend too much time on. What is really lacking is a uniform approach to the historical sitations and subsequent speculation reported. Sometimes those are inconsequential to the further progress of history, then they are turning points which change everything. Why, the reader won't learn. In the end Bill Gates will always end up owning the computer industry ... . So there is spice, but no meat ...
Rating:
Summary: Spice, but no meat!
Review: This book is neither a Turtledove-style alternative-history-novel, nor a "Virtual History" speculation by Niall Ferguson, but a collection of after-dinner mind-games. Pieces from American history with a short speculative "what if?" tale added for spice. Their style is that of a journalist's report, not that of a historian or novelist. This makes for easy reading, perhaps suitable for a transatlantic flight but not something to spend too much time on. What is really lacking is a uniform approach to the historical sitations and subsequent speculation reported. Sometimes those are inconsequential to the further progress of history, then they are turning points which change everything. Why, the reader won't learn. In the end Bill Gates will always end up owning the computer industry ... . So there is spice, but no meat ...
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