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Rating: 
Summary: Readable, but not that fun
Review: Almost History is based on a great premise, and I opened it expecting to smile a lot. A book like this should give its reader a sense of how spontaneous and alive history really is; I expected to realize that a bunch of seemingly inevitable events weren't really so ponderous, that the world of the past is fresh -- full of fallible people making the best choices they could.The book didn't quite do that for me. It's readable, it includes a few gems, but it's just not that engaging. I didn't smile that often. Partly this is just a collection of marginalia. Sure, it makes you raise your eyebrows to see Nixon thinking about a speech in case the astronauts die on the moon. When you consider it, though, any president probably would have prepared for the worst there. Whether he wrote the speech or not doesn't really get to the heart of the event -- it doesn't affect whether events happened. The book also includes the speech J.F.K. would have given on the day he was killed. That speech didn't affect whether he was shot. We can maybe hint at ways his future policies might have gone based on its text, but you know, that's hardly a lynchpin on which history turned one way or the other. (It was a fairly platitudinous speech about foreign policy through strength, by the way.) In some cases the chosen tidbits don't really even fit the premise. For example, Teddy Roosevelt's speech after he was shot during a campaign appearance is included. That IS history, it happened. There's an excerpt about the use of Navajo language by the U.S. marines in World War II. That's interesting, but how does it fit this book? The marines DID that. I guess what I'm saying is that this is a pleasant little browse, but it didn't hang together well enough to really grab me and get me staying up late. If you want a book that's lively and fun and that really airs out your sense of American History, two fantastic titles by James Loewen will do the job: "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "Lies Across America." Loewen's basic approach is to contrast the bland, textbook history we all learned with real, live, primary sources about the same events. "Teacher" examines a bunch of high school history textbooks, and "Lies Across America" looks at those historical markers your Dad always stopped at. Loewen's books both made me smile and laugh out loud. I felt like reading them out loud to other people, you know? Almost History, even in its better moments, just isn't quite in their league.
Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag of "what-ifs"
Review: One of the great games of history is the what-ifs: What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga? What if the New York City traffic accident that seriously injured Winston Churchill had killed him? This book is a documentation of myriad such what-ifs. As such, it's a good but mixed bag. The best items are genuinely poignant or thought-provoking. These include the speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon, notes that Eisenhower wrote to himself in case the Normandy Invasion was a failure, and Ulysses S. Grant declining Lincoln's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater. Less interesting ones tend to be sidelights, items that aren't all that interesting in themselves: Nixon's application to the FBI, an FBI memorandum on deporting John Lennon, and the speech Kennedy would have given in Dallas if he hadn't been shot. A few are already famous items: Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt recommending the undertaking of research into the atomic bomb and Eleanor Roosevelt's letter resigning from the DAR after it refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. Overall, though, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking collection, with the best section ("failed predictions") saved for last, in which the New York Times chides Robert Goddard for thinking that rockets can work in a vacuum, Scientific American (in 1909) believes the automobile is fully developed, and Popular Mechanics looks forward to the day when computers might weigh only a ton or so. Lots of fun stuff: interesting reading and probably another good bathroom book since the sections are short.
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