Cut-rate History
For Christmas, my cousin-in-law got me a lovely, dignified sweater and, as an auxiliary present, a small reference book titled History Makers, a hand-sized volume of biographical thumbnails for the movers and shakers of history. She left the price tag on the inside cover, so I know it came from Marshall’s at $4.99—I’m not sure how to take the attached comment, “compare at $9.00,” as there is no indication of what I should compare the price to. But I do suspect that, at $4.99, the book was overpriced.
I took my first look at it last night; within three minutes, I had found two mistakes and some very dubious labels.
On page 8, one can find an entry on John Adam, second president of the United States. The sentence following this header correctly adds an “s” to his surname.
More upsetting is the attribution of the celebrated gold death mask from a Mycenaean tomb to Agamemnon. This mask is ubiquitous in books touching upon bronze-age Greece, and, while it almost certainly belonged to a great Mycenaean, and quite possibly a king, nowhere have I seen anyone claim the tomb was Agamemnon’s specifically.
Entries are marked with a handy shorthand symbol to let you know in which field their contributions lie: science, travel, entertainment, and so on. The difference between the “politics” and “leader” categories is obscure. Why science should be represented by a dagger, or art by an explosion, even more so. There is a military category, but it is labeled “army,” so History Makers considers Admiral Nelson a great army figure. Naval historians would be outraged.
I guess the object lesson here is not to trust bargain-bin reference books. If you’re going to need to look something up, do you really want to rely on someone who reduces the price by eliminating the error-checking department?