Ben Reitman was a hobo, medical doctor, anarchist, and social reformer of the early 20th century. This book reveals his world, a world that most history books tend to ignore- the world of the hobos and political radicals (they were often one and the same) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is the world of "Hobohemia." Much of this world centered around old time Chicago (the winter quarters for most hobos) and such institutions as the Hobo College, the Dill Pickle Club, and Bughouse Square. I know that one doesn't think of hobos discussing politics, economics, literature, and the arts, but that was a large part of their world. In many ways it reminds one of the world of the Beats during the 1950's- Jack Kerouac would have fit right in. In fact, considering the surprising prevalence of jazz,"free love" and recreational drugs, it uncannily prefigured the Beat scene.

The people that Reitman knew makes an impressive list: Emma Goldman, Jack Reed, Walter Lippman, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, General Jacob Coxey, James Eads How (the "millionaire hobo") and Al Capone. The description of the many, now unknown, hobo philosophers is even more remarkable, for these were very remarkable men. These were free thinkers and intelligent and sensitive critics of the society around them. As for Reitman himself, I not only feel that I know him from reading this book, but I admire him and regret never actually meeting him.

Oh yes, while most of the men covered in this book were labeled as "radicals" by the authorities of their time, all they really wanted was to improve life for the average working man (the hobo was essentially a migrant worker) and make society a little fairer. For this they were persecuted, imprisoned, beaten, and often murdered. Some things never change....

This book, whose author works for the national archives, is an amusing collection of "Close Calls, Plan B's and Twists of Fate in America's past." Some of the items are merely drafts for press releases if D-day, Apollo 11, etc, failed disastrously. More fascinating were plans for actions not taken - Robert McNamara's meeting with Kennedy on the pre-invasion bombing of Cuba and the prosecution memorandum on indicting Nixon after his resignation. Others are little known items like Alexander Graham Bell's attempt to locate the bullet in Garfield with an induction coil that failed because the dying President was on a (then) newfangled metal spring mattress and Bell didn't know it. The great majority are amusing, some are poignant (Colonel Travis' appeal for reinforcements at the Alamo - although in the words of Chief Hendrick "if they are to fight, they are to few, if they are to die, they are too many") and H.L. Mencken's dryly humorous falsified history of the bathtub (that got out of hand when too many readers treated it as fact) is a real hoot!

One of the great games of history is the what-ifs: What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga? What if the New York City traffic accident that seriously injured Winston Churchill had killed him?

This book is a documentation of myriad such what-ifs. As such, it's a good but mixed bag. The best items are genuinely poignant or thought-provoking. These include the speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon, notes that Eisenhower wrote to himself in case the Normandy Invasion was a failure, and Ulysses S. Grant declining Lincoln's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater. Less interesting ones tend to be sidelights, items that aren't all that interesting in themselves: Nixon's application to the FBI, an FBI memorandum on deporting John Lennon, and the speech Kennedy would have given in Dallas if he hadn't been shot. A few are already famous items: Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt recommending the undertaking of research into the atomic bomb and Eleanor Roosevelt's letter resigning from the DAR after it refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.

Overall, though, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking collection, with the best section ("failed predictions") saved for last, in which the New York Times chides Robert Goddard for thinking that rockets can work in a vacuum, Scientific American (in 1909) believes the automobile is fully developed, and Popular Mechanics looks forward to the day when computers might weigh only a ton or so.

Lots of fun stuff: interesting reading and probably another good bathroom book since the sections are short.

Roger Bruns has written a very interesting book full of tidbits to entice any history buff. Whether your interest lie in the Civil War, Presidential orders, or the World Wars there will be something for everyone. For me the most interesting aspect of the book were the possible "what ifs?" of history. What would Nixon have said if the Apollo astronauts never returned from the moon? Was Kennedy trying to pull us out of Vietnam early? The other interesting items dealt with such things as Nixon's application to the FBI, Einstein's letter to the President suggesting we build an atomic bomb, and the FBI's report on John Lennon and whether or not he should be deported. The nice thing about the book is that Bruns not only provides the documents, but also offers important commentary about what was happening at the time the documents came into being. This gives the reader a much better reference point in which to appreciate the document that is being read. All in all it is a very interesting book that leaves the reader wanting more. Unfortunately, it did seem a bit short to me. If you are the type of person that is facinated by reading a telegram that warned of Pearl Harbor a year before it happened, then you will love this book.

Almost History is based on a great premise, and I opened it expecting to smile a lot. A book like this should give its reader a sense of how spontaneous and alive history really is; I expected to realize that a bunch of seemingly inevitable events weren't really so ponderous, that the world of the past is fresh -- full of fallible people making the best choices they could.

The book didn't quite do that for me. It's readable, it includes a few gems, but it's just not that engaging. I didn't smile that often.

Partly this is just a collection of marginalia. Sure, it makes you raise your eyebrows to see Nixon thinking about a speech in case the astronauts die on the moon. When you consider it, though, any president probably would have prepared for the worst there. Whether he wrote the speech or not doesn't really get to the heart of the event -- it doesn't affect whether events happened. The book also includes the speech J.F.K. would have given on the day he was killed. That speech didn't affect whether he was shot. We can maybe hint at ways his future policies might have gone based on its text, but you know, that's hardly a lynchpin on which history turned one way or the other. (It was a fairly platitudinous speech about foreign policy through strength, by the way.)

In some cases the chosen tidbits don't really even fit the premise. For example, Teddy Roosevelt's speech after he was shot during a campaign appearance is included. That IS history, it happened. There's an excerpt about the use of Navajo language by the U.S. marines in World War II. That's interesting, but how does it fit this book? The marines DID that.

I guess what I'm saying is that this is a pleasant little browse, but it didn't hang together well enough to really grab me and get me staying up late.

If you want a book that's lively and fun and that really airs out your sense of American History, two fantastic titles by James Loewen will do the job: "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "Lies Across America." Loewen's basic approach is to contrast the bland, textbook history we all learned with real, live, primary sources about the same events. "Teacher" examines a bunch of high school history textbooks, and "Lies Across America" looks at those historical markers your Dad always stopped at. Loewen's books both made me smile and laugh out loud. I felt like reading them out loud to other people, you know? Almost History, even in its better moments, just isn't quite in their league.

One of the great games of history is the what-ifs: What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga? What if the New York City traffic accident that seriously injured Winston Churchill had killed him?

This book is a documentation of myriad such what-ifs. As such, it's a good but mixed bag. The best items are genuinely poignant or thought-provoking. These include the speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon, notes that Eisenhower wrote to himself in case the Normandy Invasion was a failure, and Ulysses S. Grant declining Lincoln's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater.

Less interesting ones tend to be sidelights, items that aren't all that interesting in themselves: Nixon's application to the FBI, an FBI memorandum on deporting John Lennon, and the speech Kennedy would have given in Dallas if he hadn't been shot.

A few are already famous items: Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt recommending the undertaking of research into the atomic bomb and Eleanor Roosevelt's letter resigning from the DAR after it refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.

Overall, though, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking collection, with the best section ("failed predictions") saved for last, in which the New York Times chides Robert Goddard for thinking that rockets can work in a vacuum, Scientific American (in 1909) believes the automobile is fully developed, and Popular Mechanics looks forward to the day when computers might weigh only a ton or so.

Lots of fun stuff: interesting reading and probably another good bathroom book since the sections are short.

"Everything I had set out in life to do I had accomplished. I had wanted to
know how it felt to be a hobo, a radical, a prostitute, a thief, a reformer,
a social worker and a revolutionist. Now, I knew."

With an ending like the above, you've gotta bet that the prior 200 pages are
a fun read.

This book is more-or-less the contemporary of that classic 1930's anti-drug
movie "Refer Madness". We encounter dope fiends, perverts, dreamers,
anarchists, abortionists and many others.

I do, so much, love reading about degenerate behavior!

Somewhere in the folds is a statement that Capitalism is evil. "Sure
society has a right to defind itself. Society has the right to send me to
jail if they get the goods on me. But I've got to eat and sleep and my
child has to have his. I don't justify myself. I know I'm wrong. I know my
example is bad. But I'm so short on funds, I have to".

So, I'm reading along. 100 pages. 200 pages. Thinking to myself, hmmm
.... this woman sure had a lot of adventures in her life.

Then ... incredible, annoying, foulness! An afterward is appended to the
text by the publisher.

"In this, the 4th time that Boxcar Bertha has been reissued, we feel obliged
for the first time to make it plain that this is in fact a work of fiction.
This takes nothing away from the book as far as we are concerned."

BALONEY! What the...?!?! I could understand if they'd let the title
stand (after all, we know that the "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman" is a
novel) but why did they have to leave the binding classification as
"Autobiography"???

I feel so violated. I wouldn't have invested the time if I'd know from the
start that it was fiction. This story is only good if it's true ...
there're a dozen places where I'd have thrown the book down because of
unbelievable-ness if I'd known it were fiction.

Another raging slab of real American history you're not likely to find in the textbooks. This is the second title in the new Nabat series from AK Press that debut with Jack Black's You Can't Win. It's a window into a wildly under-appreciated dropout culture that gets left out of the stultifying fairytales that pass for history books - a much more rowdy and messily interesting tradition than the guardians of property, steeped in those other great American traditions of puritanism and hypocrisy, let on.

Hobo jungles, bughouses, whorehouses, Chicago's Main Stem, IWW meeting halls, skid rows and open freight cars - these were the haunts of the free thinking and free loving Bertha Thompson. This vivid autobiography recounts one hell of a rugged woman's hard-living depression-era saga of misadventures with pimps, hopheads, murderers, yeggs, wobblies, and anarchists.

This is a pleasant book that makes for mildly enjoyable light reading. It is short, and frequently digresses into the history of Tombstone and its more famous characters and events rather than sticking to the Bird Cage Theater itself. It has one GLARING FLAW. There are exactly two pictures of the Bird Cage Theater in the entire book. Both are very small. One picture of the outside is not even supposed to be a picture of the Bird Cage at all. The theater merely happens to be in the background of a photo of a burro pack train. The only other picture of the theater is a woefully inadequate one of the inside of the theater that is so dark you can see practically nothing. There is no diagram of the floor plan either. I have personally been inside this venerable old theater, so I could draw on that experience. Those readers who have not been there will have a difficult time grasping the ambience of the place, since the photos here are so poor. The author also confuses the reader by giving two dates the theater finally closed. On one page he says 1892, and a few pages later says 1889.

yeah this is an interesting, and staunchly Anti-Jeffersonian Biography from 1883. His vantage point makes this book a pretty groovy read, though maybe not the best for facts