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 13th
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.
