So I just finished reading a book called “Thugs” by Micah Halpern. And I recommend that you not read it unless you have a good background in history and would like to enjoy it’s many mistakes.
Written in a style that probably is appealing to middle-school to high-school age folks, it’s short punchy sentences at first seem appealing and easily readable. The book deals with ancient and modern thugs, providing a short biography of the individual and some of their acts which are construed as thugish (and in many cases, downright evil). Not a bad idea for a book. But then you start running into absolute howlers that suggest problems with fact-checking or fundamental issues with the study of history.
I’ll share two. When speaking of Ramses II, the “Thugs” states, “The symbol of the society in which the pharaohs lived was the fertile crescent, and to this day the crescent-shaped moon is one of the great symbols of Islam.” Two problems inherent in this sentence. One is the very fact that the historical definition of the fertile crescent does not include Egypt or the Nile river – it is the Levant down through Iraq (between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers). This is an area where the first historical agrarian societies began and flourished. That is the historical and correct definition of the fertile crescent and it is amazing that a history/factual book gets this wrong. The second part wrong with that sentence is the implied suggestion the Islam uses the crescent moon symbol because of the Nile river’s “crescent” shape. Nope. It comes from the 53rd sura in the Koran. And from ancient history where the people in the Arabic peninsula and Levant worshiped a large pantheon of gods including a “moon” goddess, who, incidentally was a major deity at the ancient shrine at Mecca before Islam entered the scene. We’ll let the smart readers of this blog put it together.
Another example of egregious errors found in “Thugs” is when Halpern highlights Stalin. Halpern states,” The Warsaw Pact was the engine that drove industrialization of the Soviet Union.” No. The Warsaw Pact was a Soviet Union-driven response to West Germany entering NATO in 1955. It was a mutual defense treaty among the various Communist-controlled countries that the west reffered to as the Soviet-bloc. It was not an economic treaty, much less an economic “engine.” This mistake is even more problematic since this is fairly recent history.
And that’s just two of the many errors I found throughout this book. I can not recommend it and in fact I emphatically request that high-school students (who wouldn’t be able to spot the mistakes because of lack of experience and knowledge) avoid it at all costs. I will grant that Halpern’s conclusion in “Thugs” was interesting and showed an unusual understanding of some of the beneficial after-effects of evil individuals on the stage of history and civilizations. But good conclusions and interesting thoughts can’t hide the marring of the mistakes strewn throughout the book.