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Bad Days in History: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year

by Michael Farquhar
National Geographic. Apr. 2015. 496p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781426212680. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781426212802. HIST
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Farquhar (Behind the Palace Doors; Secret Lives of the Tsars; A Treasury of Royal Scandals) here provides a catalog of historical anecdotes in which the historical agents experienced very bad days indeed. The accounts—one per calendar day—range from ancient times to the present day, encompass the famous and the virtually unknown, come from all parts of life and from around the world (with a discernible focus on the United States), and span the triflingly humorous to the deadly serious. While pithy and at times witty, the approach is perhaps too sporadic and opinionated to be of much value as serious history. For some, however, these daily snippets may spark interests to be pursued elsewhere.
VERDICT The general reader could do much worse than this volume for a daily dose of entertainment, if for nothing else as a reminder that, as the author puts it in his introduction, "no matter how lousy your day has been, somewhere in time, someone else's was so much worse."
Reviewed by Mark Spencer, Brock Univ., St. Catharines, Ont. , Feb 27, 2015
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