I love these kind of books. Whether it’s the myth-busting work of James Loewen (LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME and LIES ACROSS AMERICA), the myth-busting work of John Stossel (GIVE ME A BREAK and MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY) or, heck, the myth-busting work of MYTHBUSTERS, these “what you know is wrong” works are fun. They challenge you to confront long-held beliefs and present you with facts that you haven’t considered before. At their best, they are mind-openers. At their worst, they make you mad because they cause you to lose faith in their credibility and research.
Brian Thomsen’s THE AWFUL TRUTHS: FAMOUS MYTHS, HILARIOUSLY DEBUNKED falls in the middle here. There are quite a few bits of goodness, but it’s all tempered by a few lame chapters. To be fair, that’s par for the course in this genre. Not every section or sidebar can be a winner. For some, these myths have been busted long ago; for example, the canard that Abner Doubleday invented baseball or the historical inaccuracies of Shakespeare. There are some seriously lame and almost irrelevant sections on Oliver Stone’s first film and the irony (yawn) of calling talented comedians the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Perhaps the worst example of this is the chapter on FEMA’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina, which contrasts FEMA official statements with what the media reported. That chapter would carry credibility if Thomsen also contrasted what the media reported (rampant murder and sexual abuse in the Superdome) with what actually occurred.
More worrisome are the lack of sources (even a network-based populist like Stossel manages to include references so you can check up on his statements) and some out-and-out falsehoods. For instance, Vince Lombardi did not go out “a loser” (p. 155), as his record in his final season of coaching was seven wins, five losses and two ties. While that’s not “a win ratio of more than 50 percent,” it is also not a losing record when tie results are possible. And where he gets the line about Joe DiMaggio being the only “athlete in North American professional sports history to be on four championship teams in his first four full seasons” (p. 103) is beyond me.
Let me see, half of the Cleveland Browns did it from 1946 to 1950 (five years – four in the AAFC, one in the NFL – and then quarterback Otto Graham led the Browns to seven championships in 10 years), a bunch of the Houston Comets did it in the WNBA (first four years the Comets were the champions), and hey, what about John Havlicek, who played for the Celtics and won championships his first four years (not to mention Gene Guarilia and Tom Sanders for the same team)? This is the kind of thing that makes a reader go “huh?”
But to counteract those huhs, the book does have good sections on the Emancipation Proclamation, the Pledge of Allegiance and female astronauts in the 1960s. Maybe the book just needs a strong editorial hand, someone who is willing to jettison the truly awful cartoons and ensure that the debunking gets a bit more hilarious than the current text. I read a pre-release version, so I presume that the stunning amount of typos were fixed in the final product. A little tighter rein on the subject chapters with more relevance (the first two sections on St. Patrick and an Irish nationalist song don’t capture the interest) would be helpful. Even with the caveats mentioned above, this might be a good book to get if you enjoy having the things you “know” be proved wrong. –Mark Rose
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