Customer Reviews

History's Great Untold Stories: The Larger Than Life Characters and Dramatic Events That Changed the World

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I usually avoid books on history published by The National Geographic Society. I have found them to be written in too simple a style and without a great deal of either new or deep intellectual content. I happened to pick up this book at the local library and turn randomly to page 194. It began:
"The Taiping Rebellion, a peasant uprising that occurred in mid 19th century China, involved more combatants than any other war in the 19th century, killed more people that any other conflict apart from World War II (estimates range from 20 million to 40 million)...and changed the future of an entire country. Yet very few people outside of China have ever heard of it. Nor do many know of its messianic leader, Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to have had an apocalyptic vision that revealed he was Jesus Christ's younger brother."

I had heard of it, but knew little about it - or about many of the other events described in the book. They are all (to those of us who enjoy history) interesting - and most are fascinating. The author has the unexpected and intellectually mature view that not everything done by western Europeans and Americans has been totally angelic.

The reviewer who gave the book only 2 stars says "Any reasonably serious student of history will be familiar with all the stories Cummins chooses to tell." All right, let's see if you are a reasonably serious student of history. What do you know about the following:
1. The Cadaver Synod, 2. The Leper King of Jerusalem, 3. Subotai, 4. Rabban Sauma, 5. The Chinese Treasure Fleet of Xuan He, 6. William the 1st of Orange, 7.The Shimabara Uprising, 8.Roger Williams (of Providence Plantation, not the singer), 9. The Battle of Poltava, 10. Vitus Bering, 11. Francisco Dagohoy and the Rebels of Bohol, 12. The British Abolition Movement, 13. David Thompson, North America's Greatest Geographer, 14. George Augustus Robinson, The Great Conciliator of Van Dieman's Land.

Those are the first fourteen (of twenty-eight) chapters. How did you do?
How do you think the two-star reviewer who made the statement did? The book is well written, in a very accessible style; I would recommend it not only to get a teenager interested in history, but as interesting and unusual fare for the experienced history buff.

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, this book contains some amazing and little-known pieces of important history that ANY young man or woman should read.

One excellent example is the story of the Shimabara Rebellion in southern Japan in the 17th century. As a born-again Christian, I had no idea, even with a degree in history, that this event had ever taken place, or that it in fact was the cause of Japan's extreme isolationism prior to the late 19th century.

Another example is the story of Vitus Bering, the Danish naval hero who led Peter the Great of Russia's expedition across the northern Pacific to find a route to America via Alaska.

Yet another is the quest by Nazi's in Tibet to discover the origins of the so-called "Aryan" race.

As a paleo conservative, one who is anti-Communist and anti-left-wing, I would not recommend the "revisionist-history" elements of this book such as those mentioned by the reviewer who gave this book 2-stars. That being said, there are many valuable historical puzzle pieces in this book that otherwise might go unnoticed by a public already dummed-down by federal educational systems that have been run for years by both so-called "conservative" and "liberal" presidents and administrations.

Great book of history stories I have not heard about before and was not introduced to in schools. If you enjoy finding out about new individuals in history and other culture's stories this is an enlightening read.

I have a very strong interest in history and almost majored in it at university. I love obscure historical facts and stories. I bought this book on a whim. It had an attractive cover and seemed accessible, (there is a stigma against books with pictures or charts as "kids fair" in the history community.) I've always disliked history books with out graphics or pictures. Not because I'm a "typical American". On the contrary, I think that history books without them are doing their subject a large disservice. History involves pictures, graphics, objects and words. Like the saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words". It is no more true than in today's history books.
I found Jospeh Cummmin's book very accessible and told with a unique wit and eye for the historical context of the stories contained in this book. It takes you around the world and thru the ages to discover obscure characters and incidents that had a large impact on the world around them. I recommend it highly for history students and those who are interested in bizarre true stories.

Thanks to Amazon for the chance to select some great reading. I have never been disappointed in any book from Amazon

Sincerely, Jessie

Untold stories? Yes! But world changers? Only if you're willing to assume some validity to playing 'What If?' games. And when it comes to the facts, Cummins gets a bit sloppy. For example, describing John (actually it is JEAN) Calvin as a Scots Protestant Reformer misses the mark by several hundred, or even a thousand miles. Calvin was a FRENCH Protestant Reformer living in Switzerland. Question: If you can't trust Cummins with the better known facts, should he be trusted with the obscure facts which constitute most of the stories?

Regretably, this volume falls into the "revisionist history" category. It is also highly politicized (as in "politically correct" and anti-American). It is also a book apparently intended to influence children.

The author's ignorance and political bias are on display all throughout the book in large and small ways. For example, in a chapter on "the death of Mexican counterculture (read anarchists and Communists), Cummins writes " . . . a U.S. B-52 Stratofortress bomber crashed in Greenland, discharging four nuclear bombs that, through a miracle, did not go off."

Cummins, of course, doesn't mention why that B-52 was on patrol. It was there to keep the Soviet Union and aggressive, militaristic Communism in check.(Several Communist-led wars of "national liberation" which ultimately resulted in the deaths of millions were currently being waged.) There was no "miracle" in the failure of the nuclear weapons to detonate: both the United States and the Soviet Union went to great lengths to insure that nuclear weapons could not detonate accidently. Both the Soviet Union and the United States also took extraordinary measures to recover accidentally lost nuclear weapons from aircraft and submarine accidents. But Cummins chooses to paint the United States as an evil, aggressor at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate and untrue his assertions may be.

Cummins writes of the Communst insurgency in Malaya, the British effort to suppress it and ends, again, by damning the United States in Vietnam, which was a very different conflict. (The Malayans did not have direct military and economic support from two nuclear armed nations.) Cummins can't resist the urge to insult the Americans by claiming the British won because they brought "less firepower and more brainpower" to their much smaller and very different conflict.

Many of the incidents Cummins chooses are not those that have "faded from view". Any reasonably serious student of history will be familiar with all the stories Cummins chooses to tell.

Surprisingly, for a revisionist, politically correct history, Cummins does briefly mentions African tribes that were "rivals in the lucrative slave trade, capturing men, women, and children from villages further inland and bringing them to European slavers on the coast." Left unsaid is that there were also Arab slave traders involved. But Cummins is always Cummins: he can't resist falsifying in the name of political correctness. "One scholar has traced the histories of several of them [African women warriors]and found that, like ALMOST ANY COMBAT VERERAN, MAN OR WOMAN, they had trouble adjusting to peactime." (Emphasis supplied.) I've been a student of military history for nearly five decades and know of no study that claims "almost" all combat veterans have difficulty adjusting to peacetime. The canard, however, is a staple of left-wing intellectuals.

Overall, what Cummins has written, for the most part, is not history: it is politically correct, revisionist commentary. I certainly would not recommend it for children because it is not truthful and is more indoctrination than anything else.

Jerry