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So you think you know most of what there is to know about people like Nero and Cleopatra, Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, Lady Godiva and Miles Standish? You say there's nothing more to be written about Lucrezia Borgia? How wrong you are, for in these pages you'll find Will Cuppy footloose in the footnotes of history. He transforms these luminaries into human beings, not as we knew them from history books, but as we would have known them Cuppy-wise: foolish, fallible, and very much our common ancestors.When it was first published in 1950, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody spent four months on The New York Times best-seller list, and Edward R. Murrow devoted more than two-thirds of one of his nightly CBS programs to a reading from Cuppy's historical sketches, calling it the history book of the year. The book eventually went through eighteen hardcover printings and ten foreign editions, proof of its impeccable accuracy and deadly, imperishable humor.… (more)
User reviews
"Livy informs us that Hannibal split the huge Alpine rocks with vinegar to break a path for the elephants.
"Philip II was a great believer in diplomacy, or the art of lying. He fooled some of the people some of the time."
"The War of the Spanish Succession lasted thirteen years and would have been wonderful if it hadn't been for the Duke of Marlborough. Things went from bad to worse until just about anybody could defeat the French. On one occasion, Louis's favorite regiment was knocked out by a man named Lumley."
"The Bayeux Tapestry is accepted as an authority on many details of life and the fine points of history in the eleventh century. For instance, the horses in those days had green legs, blue bodies, yellow manes, and red heads, while the people were all double-jointed and quite different from what we generally think of as human beings."
The footnotes are witty and sharp and in no way detract from the rest of
For those that love history, this is a must read. For those who love humour, you will get plenty of laughs while also getting educated. Don't forget to read the afterword. It discusses Will Cuppy in depth. I can only imagine that my place will look like his by the time I am dead. He was a misanthrope after my own heart.
After the foreword, much of what Cuppy writes is anti-climatic but there are certainly some interesting sections about various historical features that were both amusing and educational.
It's also hard to know how seriously to take any of it. I mean, in general it's clearly not meant to be taken terribly seriously at all, but apparently Cuppy actually did to a lot of very real research on his subjects. So I imagine a lot of what he includes is more or less historically accurate, but you never do quite know what's established fact, what's mere rumor, and what's just been thrown in because it's funny.
This volume also features some droll cartoon illustration and two additional pieces about various royal personages: one involving humor and pranks, which I didn't find all that entertaining, and one about their eating habits and food preferences, which I kind of did.
Rating: It's honestly quite hard to rate this. There's a fun, oddball charm to it that makes me want to be kind to it, but I really did find the humor value variable. I guess I'm going to resist the urge to be extra generous and call it 3.5/5.