Matthew White Book Review and Analyses: The Great Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of Histories 100 Worst Atrocities. (2011/History)

The Great Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of Histories 100 Worst   Atrocities. (2011/History)

 

Author Matthew White, is an independent scholar and a self described atrocitoligist. The interesting thing about this author is that this is his first and only book and it’s colossal. Mr. White also has a web page called “The Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century”.

Before you dive in to this review check out my video review of this book on my youtube channel at this Link

Preliminary First Review:

Ok as I said before this is White’s first book and it’s a monster, it has a whopping 800 pages of info, 78 pages of notes and references and 23 pages bibliography references. So we are dealing with a Charles Zorgbibe sized book.  I can say that it's a very interesting history book, since the author isn’t an academic historian his writing style is much more informal and make it very entertaining to read its content, you are hooked from the start.

The Good:

·         The book describes in  chronological order the 100 worst atrocities that mankind has unleashed upon its self, starting 480 BC. Greco-Persian wars. The author highly details and categorizes each atrocity and establishes a ranking of how bad the event was in history, using the number of deaths the occurred during and immediately after the occurrence. 

·         White  has a unique perspective when he studies each case; he’s more of a history nerd than a historian, you can see how much he likes this subject.

·         He does shed some light on lesser known facts and some historical taboos, like cases generalized cannibalism or mass starvations, and it happened more than a I have ever imagined, at different moments in history.   

·         He also focuses on events that standard western historians omit or do not give that much relevance, like the Arab slave trade from XVII century to the XIX century, many lesser known atrocities from Chinese history like the Rebellion of Fang La, the rebellion of Taiping or that almost every major dynastic change in China tended to lead to incredible amounts of carnage, you also have the case of Rusia with its massive genocide of Ukrainians at the hands of Joseph Stalin… just to name a few.

·         The Author establishes special chapter dedicated to a certain type atrocity and works on statistics reaching some interesting conclusions related to the topics of Political Violence, Religious Wars/Killings, Slavery…  

·         To my surprise I discovered a couple interesting historic figures that I had never seen on western documentary channels (this seem like a dumb reference but sadly TV play a major role in the construction of historical identity like it or not) or never have read about, like Timur/Tamburlan/Tamerlan a warlord from central Asia who was over shadowed by Atila the Hun and Gengis Khan, but this guy is Uzbekistan national hero and he caused all kinds of trouble in central Asia and in the Middle East. Maybe he isn’t so relevant to our history because he never attacked Europe, but like this example this book has a ton of other lesser known but tremendously relevant historical figures. Another example is the case of Homg Xiuquan who lead the the Rebelion of Taiping, he was the leader of a messianic cult in China, who thought he was the son of God after having a vision with Jesus Christ, his  uprising left aproximetly 20 million dead.

·         Something very interesting to read about in this book are  horrible statics of Joseph Staling, he’s actually competes with Hitler in being the worst the humanity has to offer, for our hall of shame, he had a hand in the genocide of five ethnic groups in his country and he sent just about any one he didn’t like to die in the gulags in Siberia. But these two guys do not top the ranking it goes to  another contemporary historical figure that actual bets these guys for the first place, read the book to see who it is.  


Belgium’s king Leopold II was a real dirt bag, he did some really messed up  stuff  in the Congo and in central Africa.  

 

·         The Chapters of the First and Second World War, the Russian civil war and Chinese civil war are super complete.

·         This book illustrates something that most history book tend to look over during the aftermath of the Second World War was the purge of ethnic German from Eastern Europe, which has a calculated death toll of 2 million Germans. P. 598   
       

·         In the book's appendix the author adds some atrocities that didn’t make the cut here we have the Troyan War ( no one has been able to establish 100%  where the battle took place), the Battle of Comnor ( this part of Mormon tradition where millions died in a battle between the  Shiz and the Coriantumr, in the northern part of New York state, there is no way to scientifically show that this battle ever took place ), the Reconquering of Spain from the Muslims (no feasible statistics), Turkish genocide suffered at the hand of Greek and Armenians (this one is really interesting some Turks affirm that 5 million of them were systematically massacred at the end of the Ottoman Empire, there are no faceable statics that this happened at this colossal scale)… these are just to name a few. 


·         To my surprise the author establishes a couple of interesting conclusions in the introduction. Chaos is more lethal than tyranny, many mass extermination are product of the loss of authority. Insurrections and anarchic situations are extremely dangerous periods; the author uses as example the extremely long civil war in early China. (P; 17) 

·         The world is a disorganized place; power structures tend to be informal and transitory (P;17). From my point of view it’s very interesting to see how power tends to slip away from formal power structures, in a way it has a life of its own, or many times formal power structures try to capture power or control it like damming a river, but failing miserably.

·         War kills more civilians than soldiers and the author affirms; and goes further to afirm that to be in the army is the safest place to be in a conflict. Soldier gets weapons, good food y good medical care. Armies do not get pillaged, do not suffer starvation or suffer systematic rapes and other abuses that civilians do. (P;17) 

 

·         49% of all authoritarian leaders stay in power till death and 11% go silently into retirement, now this a really surprising static and it’s scary, because that means there is very little accountability to the abuse of power only 9% are tried in a court of law, and democratic systems are not immune to these vices of falling under the control of a authoritarian regimes. 

  


 

Debatable Aspects.

·         Using death tolls to rank atrocities is a pretty subjective one dimensional  way to study complex social issues, and this  can lead to a lopsided analyses and it’s very hard to get real death tolls, each side of a conflict tends to exaggerate their looses. White knows this so he does try to make his analyses as rich as possible and he uses tons of references. And he does challenge the reader constructively to reach their own conclusions. 

·         To Make the ranking of the book, the deaths occurred from the atrocity must have happen during or immediately after of the event and their most be some level coercion, so using this argument the author automatically discards Cigarettes from the ranking ( White uses this example), another important aspect for the author is that the person  must have been born, so abortion isn’t considered in the book.  


The Bad:


·         White doesn’t explicitly define atrocity. He does approximate himself to a definition but never actually gives one.
 
·         The Appendix really helps to define the book and its subject, but that’s really odd to put this info at the back of the book, I would have put this at the front in the introduction.

·         The only conflicts that the author mentions from Latin America are the Mexican Independence, Cuban Revolution and the War of the Triple Alliance against Francisco Solanos Lopez’s Paraguay, no dirty wars that raged during the late 70's too mid 80's.

·         Book doesn’t accuse the United State of America or any of its leaders explicitly of any atrocity in the title of any specific chapter, even though the book attributes the US in participating of 11 multicides tying with Germany at the fifth place for the amount of large scale atrocities (note not the overall body count). I really think that George W Bush should have landed a place in this book, the invasion of Iraq was totally uncalled for, in the name of Regime Change and supposedly legitimated in the context of the War on Terrorism and the danger of WMDs, that where never found (ideology and personal interest took the US down a dangerous and counter productive path, but note I do think actions against Afghanistan were legitimate). The Iraq War was just one blunder after another coasting lives on all sides, and the sad thing is that thinking paradigmatically, pulling out of Iraq probably has been even a worse mistake, the whole occupation of this country was a colossal strategic mistake and the repercussions from this error can be felt today (2015)  . Now in this case the author establishes in the annex that this war death toll isn’t high enough at 150.000 deaths (number taken in 2006), that a pretty questionable number, I honestly I think the author avoided adding this one to avoid people writing anything that would sound to anti-American. . 

Verdict: This book is a great read highly recommendable.