Customer Reviews

History's Last Stand: The Last Gasps, Fatal Falls and Final Gambles of Heroes, Despots and Civilizations

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Wow! That last reviewer must have woke up on the wrong side of the alley! Using a clever format, "History's Last Stand" takes up a couple hundred of History's grand finales. Anecdotes -- both serious and irreverent -- include such events as Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine, Abraham Lincoln's assassination, General 'Chinese' Gordon's fall at Khartoum, and D.B. Cooper's jump from a Boeing 727. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

The back copy implies this will either be funny/snarky or dramatic. It's neither. It reads like a "blog book" - a collection of stuff thrown together for a book deal.

History's Last Stand suffers from erratic coverage. It notes Belle Starr's last day alive, but not who she was. It's presumed the reader knows. I had to Wikipedia her, and okay, she's interesting, but not enough IMO to deserve an entry for Her Last Dying Day. One of Bugsy Siegel's entries notes that he hated the nickname Bugsy, but nowhere is his actual name mentioned.

I got it from the library, hoping for a good "tank topper" (plunk it on the toilet tank and skim it when you're using the facilities), but there are better tank toppers out there. Between the bad editing, the factual errors, and the uneven coverage, skip this book. I'm very glad I didn't pay money for this.

I picked up a copy of this at a church sale because I love lists, dates, and random historical facts and figures. I paid 50 cents, and I got burned! Not only is the book ridiculously shallow in both concept and execution, there are factual errors -- lots of them...here, there and everywhere. Alexander the Great did not invade Italy in 327 B.C. Pompeii was not "one of the great cultural centers of the Roman Empire," it was a small provincial town. The Plantagenet dynasty did not end with with Richard II in 1399 -- the Houses of York and Lancaster which ruled through 1485 were just as Plantagenet as he. Henry VIII became king in 1509, not 1505. And his wives did not die "one by one...either giving birth or [falling] victim to his madness." He divorced two of them, and one outlived him. The Thirty Years War was not "the last of the great wars the world would see until World War I," not by a long shot.

And so it goes...page after page of falsehoods. And the editing is incredibly sloppy, too. A complete waste of time, paper, and 50 cents.

This is one of the worst buys of my life. I thought I was purchasing a book of anecdotes and interesting short stories throughout history's greatest exits. This is a book that utilizes the same amount of space for Prince Humbert II as it does for great finales of General Custer or the Berlin Wall. Any person I can save from buying this book is all the better.