Alte 100 de greșeli care au schimbat lumea

by Bill Fawcett, Dragos Tudor (Translator)

Hindsight hurts.

* The British Parliament passes the Stamp Act, having the American colonies pay for their own defense--which instead starts a revolution.
* In 1929, President Herbert Hoover decides to let the economy fix itself...and the Great Depression gets greater.
* Nixon tapes everything he says in the Oval Office, believing it will all be of great historical value. He turns out to be right when those same tapes cost him his presidency.
* Charles the First cuts a deal with the Irish to fight Parliament that instead loses him public support--and later his head.

Along with 100 Mistakes that Changed the World, Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing proves once again that when global leaders drop the ball, the whole world shakes. With a hundred more bombshell blunders--from Pickett's Charge to the Lewinski scandal--this compendium takes a fascinating look at some of history's greatest turns for the worse.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2012

About the author

Bill Fawcett has been a professor, teacher, corporate executive, and college dean. His entire life has been spent in the creative fields and managing other creative individuals. He is one of the founders of Mayfair Games, a board and role-play gaming company. As an author, Fawcett has written or coauthored over a dozen books and dozens of articles and short stories. As a book packager, a person who prepares series of books from concept to production for major publishers, his company, Bill Fawcett & Associates, has packaged more than 250 titles for virtually every major publisher. He founded, and later sold, what is now the largest hobby shop in Northern Illinois.

Fawcett’s first commercial writing appeared as articles in the Dragon magazine and include some of the earliest appearances of classes and monster types for Dungeons & Dragons. With Mayfair Games he created, wrote, and edited many of the Role Aides role-playing game modules and supplements released in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, he also designed almost a dozen board games, including several Charles Roberts Award (gaming's Emmy) winners, such as Empire Builder and Sanctuary.

Reviews

[Andrei Zaharia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting reading from which I learned a few things about history that I had no clue about. What I didn't like was the lack of diversity - I feel like 80% of the book is either about things from the Second World War or about America in general. Also, many of them I wouldn't categorize as mistakes in the way you would think when you hear that word, but just decisions made in a way that proved not to be the most optimal.

[Howard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun pop history overview of some of the most egregious fails over the years. A few are certainly up for interpretation, but I never felt like I was being preached to. All of this is pretty airy and pretty mainstream stuff. A quick read.

[Jay Ahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of these chapters are actually on military tactical errors rather than major historical mistakes, particularly those in the Civil War and the World Wars. I would have liked to see more chapters like that on the futility of the Prohibition, or China's first emperor's quest for immortality, because those were interesting reads.

The writer could have been a lot more concise, for instance the 15 or more chapters on Hitler could have been summarised into two, by pointing his errors to his overaggressive strategy and deteriorated mental health. I wouldn't have minded the book having just 20 chapters instead of the titular 100, most of which are frankly uninteresting and over-speculation.

[Pip Snort · Rating 3 out of 5]

A skim through history from Alexander the Great to the Fukishima nuclear disaster. It is definitely a skim and is coloured by the politics and perspective of the author. Interesting.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a great book.

This book may be factually inaccurate in ways that I can't even begin to guess.

But this book had one thing in its favor: it was not translated from Russian.

Yes, this book earned a star by NOT being Anna Karenina. Congratulations.

Though its page count is high, Many of those pages are far far far from full pages (there are like bazillion chapters), so it's a much quicker read than you might think.

Fawcett goes through a ton of historical incidents and points out the bad decision that may have changed everything. Of course, the only difference between a bad decision and GENIUS is who wins. And some of them seemed a stretch. If only...blah...then...blah...wouldn't have happened. In history, cause and effect just aren't that clear cut. It's not a math problem

It was a fun quick read. Think of it as beach reading for history nerds.

[Patrick Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a quick read, entertaining, and informative, but it was not edited well or fact-checked carefully. For example, in Chapter 56 the text locates the Sudetenland in eastern Czechoslovakia. The next page features a map clearly showing the Sudetenland in western and northern Czechoslovakia. In the last chapter the 2011 tsunami that devastated the Fukushima prefect in Japan is referred to as the "Tokyo tsunami." A few dollars spent on better editing or fact checking would have made this a more valuable book for the occasional reader of history.

[MpaulM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I noticed he used the same mistakes in this book as he did in his previous one. Also, about 1/4 of it is WW2 history. Kind of disappointed in this one but it is a great book to learn the basics of human history.

[Trey Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intresting and shows how everything history wise meshes togeher

[Stephanie Franklin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't get through this one. The author's tube is a combination of condescending and pompous, and there are some basic factual errors in some of the dates.

[Eleodor · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
And so we have. Time and again, mankind has faced down problems, but have often failed to take the hard-earned knowledge into the next battle.

[Jen Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Biased. Boring. Skipped most of it.