Title: The United States of Absurdity
Rating: 4 Stars
When I read a nonfiction book, oftentimes it’s a dense book on some weighty subject. This year I read Gotham, which is a 1200 or so page history of New York City (only up to 1898!). Some years ago, I read The Power Broker, which is an even longer biography of Robert Moses. I’ve read pretty in-depth histories on wars, racism, sexism, and struggles for equality and against injustice.
This is not one of those books. This is an extremely lightweight book written by two comedians. They write about a couple of dozen odd episodes in US history. No episode takes more than four or five pages (most are about three pages).
To me, that’s a good thing. Not everything has to be serious and weighty. Each vignette is written from a humorous point of view, even if the actual outcome is not at all funny. People do die in some of these events.
This book has a soft spot in my heart because it is reminiscent of how I fell in love with history in the first place. It’s not like I have some natural affinity with the dates and people that normally populate a typical school history textbook. When I was young, I had a weird predilection for trivia. My parents, wanting to nourish their budding nerd, would buy me random trivia books. From these books, I learned wacky, weird things that I found amusing. I learned that history can be more than just memorizing dates and places. History is alive with action, mystery, humor, and just plain old oddness. Ultimately, that small spark led me to reading seemingly interminable tomes that I now for some reason find fascinating.
I had some familiarity with probably about half of the episodes described in the book. Even those that I’d read about before, encountering them here was like greeting old friends.
What kinds of historical events are described here?
Well, there’s the story of Mike Malloy. Malloy was an alcoholic lurking about a dive bar during Prohibition. Seeing what a beaten down drunk he was, the owner of the dive bar and his friends took out a number of life insurance policies on him. The bar owner then gave Malloy unlimited drinks, thinking that he’d quickly drink himself to death. Unfortunately for the owner, Malloy apparently had an unlimited capacity for alcohol. Failing that, he started giving Malloy straight shots of wood alcohol (you know, poison). Nothing doing. They started giving him free sandwiches soaked in wood alcohol and full of rotting seafood. Malloy collapsed. They thought he was dead. Instead, he started snoring. Their attempts to kill him got even more desperate and more outlandish, verging on the comical. He proved harder to kill than Rasputin.
If that doesn’t capture your interest, how about the Straw Hat Riots? In the early 20th century, hats were considered standard attire for men. Straw hats were popular but there was definitely rules around the wearing of them. Straw hats were only to be worn between May 15th and September 15th. In New York City, this rule was strictly enforced. Starting around September 13th, youth gangs would roam the streets looking for men wearing straw hats. At a minimum, the gang would knock the hat off the man’s head and destroy it. Sometimes, the men would be beaten. The straw hat wearing men did not take kindly to this treatment. This led to riots that had to be broken up by the police. Men ended up in the hospital. One man was killed. All this over wearing a straw hat slightly late in the season.
Let’s not forget about John Brinkley. Starting around 1920, he was a doctor (well, he purchased a medical degree) specializing in male sexual dysfunction. He had a brilliant inspiration. Everyone knows the phrase “randy as a goat”. Well, what if he took goat testicles and transplanted them into men? He tried it and claimed all kinds of success (and some forty deaths that he didn’t advertise quite so openly). It probably didn’t help matters that he frequently performed surgeries drunk and with unsterilized instruments.
That’s just a quick selection. If none of those catch your fancy you can read about a meat shower, one of the all time great baseball pitchers that would go running off the mound whenever a fire engine drove by, the time when people in Rhode Island thought that vampires were spreading tuberculosis (and the somewhat extreme measures that they took in response), and the real reason why George Washington might have died (hint, doctors really, really didn’t know what they were doing in those days).
If you have a free hour or two to kill and would like to learn about some of the smaller, darker corners of American history, this book would be well worth your time.
dorkenstein 