BAD DAYS IN HISTORY

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Everybody has a bad day occasionally. Michael Farquhar has compiled a book of 364 horrible days people have had throughout history, one for each day (although apparently nothing bad every happened on Leap Day.*) Looking as far back as the death of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC, Bad Days in History is a litany of poor decisions, bad luck, and natural disasters that befell people who woke up on a given morning thinking their day would be normal.

Each entry of bad luck takes up about a page, occasionally running a little longer or shorter. Farquhar introduces each item with the date and year the event occurred and then a short headline, sometimes the headline tells the story, as with "." Other times the headline only hints at what is to follow, such as "Army + Artillery vs. Emus: And the Winner Is..." A few of the entries run only a few lines, and in many cases, Farquhar includes a footnote to further explain the incidents at the end of each month.

Assassinations and murders are a frequent topic in Farquhar's book. He notes that Tsar Nicholas was assassinated 1964 years after Julius Caesar to the day. The Roman emperor Elagabalus and his mother were beheaded together on March 11, 222. Although his article about Tyche Brahe just talks about Brahe's death because he wouldn't leave a nobleman's table to go to the bathroom, a footnote indicates that poison may have been involved in his death. Even when assassinations are not involved, many of the stories focus on rulers and politicians, from Kaiser Wilhelm II's treatment of his father's death to Governor Earl K. Long's dementia.

While many of the items Farquhar has collected are esoteric, like the ignominy suffered by Siegfried Esajas, an Olympic athlete who missed the qualifying heat, others have achieved their own level of notoriety, such as the 1970 attempt to remove a whale carcass in Florence, Oregon with explosives. Similarly, Marge Schott losing control of the Cincinnati Reds after letting loose a string of racial slurs, received a great deal of publicity when it happened and is well known to baseball fans.

Not all of the entries in Bad Days in History are catastrophic. The worst thing Farquhar could find for November 15 was the cancellation of Life with Lucy, Lucille Ball's final television series. Although Ball took the cancellation personally and couldn't get past the realization that she was no longer the star she once was. Compared to many of the events Farquhar covers, it does not seem like a major catastrophe. Meanwhile, April 1 is used to discuss a series of non-funny April Fool's Day jokes perpetrated by Uday Hussein and Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth perpetrated following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war.

Bad Days in History is the sort of book that benefits from dipping into the book at random, or even in order, but not reading it straight through. With an entry per day, a reader could easily make the book last an entire year and they read what has gone wrong on that date in previous years. For those who finish the book too quickly, or want to feel a sense of Schadenfreude all over again, Farquahar did follow this volume up with More Bad Days in History.

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*Three separate plane crashes have occured on February 20, in 1964, 1968, and 1996. Misha Defonseca also admitted her claim to have survived the Holocaust by living with a pack of wolf was fraud on February 29.

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