Terry Deary has a Ph.D. in Horribleness

 Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series was all the rage when I was in elementary school way back in the nineties, a period which should probably have its own Horrible History book written up soon. A quick Google informs me that the series is still going strong, sparing me the need to gripe about Kids These Days. It also appears I have a lot of catching up to do! Despite being a decade out of its target market (at least), these books retain the same appeal they had when I was in fifth grade—and not just out of nostalgia, either. They mix corny jokes and cartoons with historical facts, focusing on the gory, unusual, and gross. Since history is so full of gory, unusual and gross things, the books make a fairly solid general history of each period they cover. The series makes a big point of being “The history grown-ups don’t want children to know,” although it is actually quite child-friendly, omitting the age-inappropriate aspects of the stories they recount. The books also include hands-on projects for the reader to try out, such as games and recipes. In short, they are fun.

 The title of The Awesome Egyptians initially had me worried—it sounded like it might be light on horribleness. Luckily, I was wrong. While it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Egyptians were indeed awesome, Deary finds plenty of nasty tidbits to entertain the reader. A fair chunk of the book dwells on ancient Egyptian social issues, particularly class and gender, because they were terrible. We learn about the lives of peasants and the first recorded labor strike; the incestuous line of succession and the complicated mess of rituals that made up the woman-king Hatshepsut’s gender presentation. Much of the book is, of course, about death and mummies and grave-robbing, these being the paramount concerns of both children who like disgusting things and the actual Ancient Egyptians. The book is weakest when covering the subjects all “Ancient Egypt for children” materials cover—a brief roster of gods, a simplified hieroglyphic alphabet—but this is a small portion of the book. Luckily, many more pages are dedicated to the unusual lives and deaths of important Egyptians and Egyptologists, including such colorful events as King Cheops losing his mother's mummy, Queen Ankhesenamun being forced to marry her own grandfather, and the spate of mysterious deaths following the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The Legend of Isis and Osiris is slightly sanitized, of course—Deary claims that Isis found all of Osiris’ body parts, and neglects to tell us that the purpose of this particular legend was to explain what made the Nile Valley fertile. But there’s still more than enough weirdness left to entertain even the least history-inclined child, and the book leaves the reader where any decent ancient history book should leave him or her—with an appreciation, even awe, of the great ancient civilizations, but grateful to be living now instead.

 I reread The Groovy Greeks next, which I recall reading so many times as a wee geek that my copy of it fell apart. I thought I knew a thing or two about the Greeks, back then. I was wrong, of course, and this book—like all books on Greek history or Greek myths for children—suffers much from the degree of bowdlerization necessary to make it child-appropriate. As such, The Groovy Greeks is merely full of cartoon pictures of nude Greeks, references to situations in which Greeks did not wear clothes, a story about Alcibiades knocking the “naughty bits” off statues, and a few references to the Greeks having a low opinion of women. However, it remains entertaining enough to keep a wee geek interested in the Greeks until he or she is old enough to learn that the Greeks were actually more misogynistic than Representative Bobby Franklin and more homosocial than “Life at the Outpost,” and that most of their legends involve rape. But despite this lack of all the most disgusting bits of Greek history and myth, and the undeniably pro-Greek tone of the book (mostly established by frequent use of the word “groovy”), it’s still a Horrible History, because history is messed up. There’s death, and fighting, and death, and human sacrifices, and death. There’s a story about eating babies, and a story about attempted infanticide, and they are not the same story because when Cronos eats his babies, they chill all healthy in his stomach until he throws them up, because whoever wrote the Greek myths was on crack or something. The moral of the story here is, basically: no matter how much you bowdlerize the Greeks, they will still be really interesting because they were that inappropriate.

 The Rotten Romans has its share of gross cultural information, but overall this volume in the series focuses heavily on individual rotten Romans. This is understandable, as there were quite a lot of them. What is also understandable, but a lot more irritating, is that the book also focuses hugely on the Roman Empire in Britain, giving extremely short shrift to the whole other, like, third of the world that they took over. I suppose this is also somewhat understandable, considering the books are written in the UK, but it gives a rather lopsided history.

The Vicious Vikings occasionally succumbs to the same Britain-centric viewpoint, but not as badly. I think my biggest issue with this one was the pages on food, which basically covered “stuff the Vikings used to eat which you might like” and “stuff the Vikings used to eat which are totally gross.” Half the stuff filed under “stuff the Vikings used to eat which are totally gross” is foods that they STILL EAT in Scandinavia today, some of which I have eaten personally. (Moose is delicious.) And I'm really not sure how they determined that young children would obviously find fish-head-and-pepper soup appetizing, but not goose. Or boar, which is basically medieval for “pork.” Overall, though, the book is a lot of fun. A lot of this is because it's just hard to make Vikings boring, but some of it is Deary's ridiculous style. (The book opens with a cartoon of a girl threatening a Jelly Baby. You can't go wrong making jokes about Jelly Babies.)

 The Measly Middle Ages beats out all but possibly the Romans for the most Horrible History in the bunch. This is unsurprising, as the Middle Ages sucked hardcore. Even Deary seems continually surprised at just how craptastic it was, and that is the point of the entire series. There’s a lot about medieval misogyny in this book (I get the feeling it is less glossed over than in The Groovy Greeks because there is less cool other stuff that makes you want to bury it and pretend everything’s okay). However, it is followed up by a few short biographies of kickass medieval ladies who I might need to go buy books on now. Gentle reader, please help me remember the following names: Jeanne de Clisson, Marcia Ordelaffi, Madame de Montfort, and Isabella of England. (Also Joan of Arc, although I already knew who she was.) This book ends on a giant downer, with Deary basically saying “The Middle Ages were full of stupidity, greed and cruelty, also some historians say they ended at the beginning of the Tudor Era but THEY WERE WRONG. IT IS STILL THE MIDDLE AGES.” Then there is a depressing cartoon about a kid doing a school paper on “Religion, war and pestilence” and his mother thinks it’s a history paper BUT SHE IS WRONG.

As such, I eagerly await the “Crappy Current Events” series. I am sure it will be both more factual and more entertaining than watching the news.