Napoleon's Hemorrhoids - Phil Mason

   2010; 243 pages (including the Introduction, but not the Index).  Full Title: Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids – And Other Small Events that Changed History.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Historical Trivia; Non-Fiction; History - Anecdotes.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    There is a famous proverb titled ”For want of a nail”.  Wikipedia says it’s been around since the 13^th century, and it comes in many variations.  One of the shorter versions is:

 

   “For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
    For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
    For want of a horse the battle was lost;
    For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—
    All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.”

 

    The principle of the proverb is that small changes in seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes have major impacts on history-making events.  Sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

 

    In Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids, Phil Mason offers up a slew of examples of this, in all sorts of fields such as history, politics, business, sports, science, and even the arts.  Wacky things, such as Napoleon’s hemorrhoids flaring up on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, may have changed the course of history.

 

    Over and over, you’ll find yourself “what if such and such an incidental event had never occurred"?

 

What’s To Like...

    Napoleon’s  Hemorrhoids consists of ten chapters, each spotlighting a different area.  They are:

    Chapter 01: Detours in the Match of History

    Chapter 02: Politics – Fates and Fortunes

    Chapter 03: History’s Tricks – Accidents, Illnesses and Assassinations

    Chapter 04: The Fog of War

    Chapter 05: Science – Inspiration, Invention and Intrigue

    Chapter 06: Chance Beginnings

    Chapter 07: Artistic Strokes (of Luck)

    Chapter 08: “Unlucky, Sport!”

    Chapter 09: Crime – Missed Demeanours

    Chapter 10: Business – Enterprise and Intuition

    None of the chapters are in the least bit boring, and it's no surprise that Chapter 4, The Fog of War, is the longest one, logging in at 47 pages.

 

    The author is lives in England, which means the book is written in "English", not "American".  So you encounter spellings like tranquillity, centred, tyres, licence, 40-storey, and have to figure out what the phrase “cock a snook” means, which is given below.  The entries are generally short – sometimes just one or two paragraphs, occasionally as long as a page or two.

 

    I was already aware of some of the entries, such as:

    The Battle of Gettysburg was an accident and only happened because all because one army wanted some boots.

    In Central America in 1969, a war was fought over a soccer match.

    How rabbits were introduced, and then ran like a plague unchecked over Australia.

    The USA ignored numerous warnings leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor,

    How Post-It notes were developed.

    Captain Oates’ final Antarctic walk.

 

    But most of the entries were new to me.  I learned lots of new trivia, such as:

    How the Alaskan city of Nome got its name.

    Bayer once marketed heroin as a commercial product.

    The last words of Albert Einstein.

    The controversy about the naming of Uranus. <snickers>

    How close we came to starting a nuclear war in 1962.

 

    There’s a 14-page index in the back which came in quite handy while I was reading the book.  Don’t be misled by the text’s overall lighthearted tone and the fact that its target audience is the British public.  There are a lot of wonderful and little-known historical anecdotes here that really will make you pause to wonder how big a part serendipity played in history down through the millennia.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cock a snook (v., phrase) : to openly show contempt or a lack of respect for someone or something..

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 520 ratings and 184 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.36*/5, based on 1,304 ratings and 71 reviews.

 

 

Excerpts...

    The change of weather from the heat of Algeria to a European winter gave Arnaud a terrific cold.  As he led his forces to confront a mob resisting the coup he is said to have caught a coughing fit.  As it ended, he cursed “Ma sacrée toux” (“My damned cough!”).  The head of the Guard misheard it as “Massacrez tous” (“Massacre them all”) and launched an assault on the crowd.  Up to 800 people are believed to have been killed.  It was the pivotal moment in turning the tide of the coup.  (pg. 9)

 

    The West African state of Benin had its entire air force destroyed in 1988 by a single errant golf shot.

    Metthieu Goya, a ground technician and keen golfer, was practising on the airfield during a lunchtime break when he sliced a drive.  Th ball struck the windscreen of a jet fighter that was preparing to take off, causing it to career into the country’s other four jets neatly lined up by the runway.  All five aircraft were write-offs.  (pg. 68)

 

New York became British because of a Dutch obsession with nutmegs.  (pg. 5)

    The quibbles are minor.

 

    As noted, Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids is written with the British reading audience in mind.  Thus the chapters generally start out with entries that involve English activities, then follow with ones involving the rest of the world.  This was generally not off-putting to a Yankee reader like me, except for the chapter on sports which led off with a number of entries about the quaint but unfathomable sport of cricket.

 

    Also, Phil Mason rarely if ever lists the sources of the small-but-impactful events he cites.  True, in these days of Google and Wikipedia, researching something on your own is easy, and yes, if he had devoted 50 pages to “Notes and Sources” I’d be bitching about how many trees he was killing to produce those pages (I read the hardcover version).

 

    The most egregious of this came on page 28, with an anecdote about a “would-be minister who has remained unidentified” blowing a one-on-one interview given by the British Prime Minister because the applicant was in “fawning mode” too much.  Exactly how could there by a source for that?

 

    That’s about it.  Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids is an incredibly clean read.  The lone cussword was on page six, and was a “lavatorial allusion” attributed to Martin Luther, and the lone typo I caught was the often-encountered “loose/lose” mix-up.

 

    Overall, Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids was exactly what I was looking for.  It wasn’t an in-depth scholarly treatise, but it was never intended to be.  What it was, was both an enlightening and a fun read.

 

    7½ Stars.  One last thing.  As Americans, we are given a decidedly slanted viewpoint when it comes to teaching United States History.  Basically, we never did anything stupid or wrong.  So it was interesting to read the more objective viewpoints of a British author concerning our country's actions.