The Germans had come so close to winning the First World War they couldn't believe they didn't.Ĭommunism lasted longer than fascism, jazz, John Wayne, Bonanza and the American Motor Corporation.īelieve me, I don't want to discuss Shaka's penis any more than you want to read about it Like one of those countdown programmes on cheesy tv - 2016's 100 Most Shocking Celebrity Moments - it ranks massacres, wars and man-made catastrophes of limitless human suffering and discusses them all in a slightly unnerving jokey chatty unhistorianlike manner :

This book isn't in the best possible taste. 20 black-and-white illustrations and 4 maps By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, 'the numbers that people want to argue about.' Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history―from an atrocitologist’s point of view.

Atrocitology by Matthew White