Unreliable history books plot twisted course to a good night's sleep

Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano (translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried) Portobello Books/Allen & Unwin, $39.99

The Mental Floss History of the World by Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand, Harper, $27.99

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I GUESS YOU know what I mean by bedside books? Those things you put near your pillow for 10 minutes undemanding entertainment before lights out. This is the best way to read both the 364 pages of Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors and the 400-plus pages of Sass and Wiegand's Mental Floss History of the World. They are both books of snippets, and bits and pieces, better for the short attention span than for the concentrated read. But their agendas are rather different.

Eduardo Hughes Galeano is a very famous South American intellectual. As a dissident journalist and author, he was imprisoned in his native Uruguay by the military dictatorship, but managed to outlive it. He flourishes as a supporter of civic rights and an opponent of Yanqui imperialism. Mirrors (Espejos in the original Spanish) comes with a blurb full of praise from John Berger and Isabel Allende. It is subtitled "Stories of Almost Everyone" and, in about 600 paragraph-length stories, it covers thousands of years of human history, beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with us. On one level, it's a case of what the French would call faits divers – various and diverting facts. But out of the countless historical stories he could have used, Galeano has selected only those that support his world view. Ideology is the child of selection, as any historian can affirm.

So what do we learn from Mirrors?

Basically that all ancient empires were slave empires and modern empires were built on slavery too. That Christianity was generally a bad thing. That Catholics and Protestants were equally hypocritical, plundering the earth in the name of God. That England ran the biggest slave trade ever, while pretending to a humane and liberal state. That actually Europeans per se are pretty dreadful because their secular and post-religious states were just as bad. That after Spain and Portugal had raped South American Indians, the USA and England took turns raping the whole of South America, economically and militarily. And, of course, that women were always being shafted by men. When it comes to explaining why the radical left-wing alternatives fell apart so quickly, Galeano falls back on the familiar leftie apologia of the dictatorship of the proletariat being perverted into the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. So that neatly explains Stalin and all recent evils that aren't the fault of Yanqui imperialism.

Most of Galeano's stories are factual, but some are fiction. He seems to believe the fiction of Marie Antoinette saying "Let 'em eat cake". He certainly believes the fiction about Bishop Wilberforce opposing the theory of evolution by asking whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side. When he tells us that "salary" comes from the Latin word for "salt" you want to ask if he is choosing to say the bleeding obvious, of just suffering from too much Wikipedia scholarship.

On the matter of beating a familiar path, however, he's nowhere near Sass and Wiegand's Mental Floss History of the World. Founded eight years ago, Mental Floss is an American magazine which advertises itself as being "Where Knowledge Junkies get Their Fix". Every so often it puts out a related book. This one is subtitled "An Irreverent Romp Through Civilisation's Best Bits". Which leads me to ask "Irreverent to what?" To our intelligence, maybe. Essentially this is your standard broad-scope history book, where civilisation begins in the river deltas of the Middle East and spreads through Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and Roman Empires before busting out of Europe and spreading to the whole world, reaching perfection in the US. Actually, the authors are aware of China and Asian civilisations and they do give a few pages to the pre-Columbian Americas. But this remains the basic Euro-centric overview.

What is the ideological sense behind it? Perhaps nothing as conscious as Galeano's fierce anti-colonialism, but there is an ideology nevertheless. The tone is relentlessly facetious, filled with the type of one-liners and wisecracks that teachers sometimes use to jolly along slow classes. Far from making the past more accessible, this approach trivialises it by cutting it down to our size. What we are really being told is that history is no more significant than our soaps and sitcoms, and that therefore our present media culture is the measure of all worth. It is entirely appropriate that this history of civilisation ends with a page on the staggering historical fact of (wait for it!) how many Canadians have made it big on the US comedy circuit. So, apparently, that's the pinnacle to which the march from Mesopotamian river cities has led us.

Would I choose either of these books as a reliable history book? Not really.

Ideology defeats history in Galeano's book and tone defeats substance in the Mental Floss book. But, as a bedside book, Galeano wins hands down. Not only is he much angrier but, at his best, he is much funnier than the team of American magazine wits. Just the thing for lights out.

Nicholas Reid is an Auckland historian and reviewer.

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