A Book in Review – UJBR: Plunges into History

Book Count: 7

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: Plunges into History By: The Bathroom Readers’ Hysterical Institute
Non-Fiction: History, short stories 490 pages 2001

We at WNBNI like history and we like short stories and factoids so it would stand to reason that we would love this book. And for the most part we did like it, there was just one problem, in multiple cases the book states something as fact that we have heard from multiple other reliable sources is not true or isn’t known. And its not like it’s saying “many people think this but its incorrect” or “new evidence shows this” it just acts like it is already an established fact. For example, there is an article on the Roma (aka Gypsies) stating that they are from Northern India as if everyone knows that. Sure the name Gypsy, meaning one from Egypt is generally thought to be incorrect by all, but we’ve read interviews of people who were Roma stating that they are called that because they are from Rome, and of course there are the various people who believe that they are a “Lost Tribe” of Israel or are originally from some other group in the Middle East with all the similarities in culture. And again it would be one thing if they backed this “fact” up (for example if it was determined as part of the human genome project) and sure it adds to the cruel irony of Nazism if one of the groups that they went after were the only true Aryans in Germany, but with multiple facts that we don’t know if they are facts or not we could no longer trust that any of the facts that we didn’t already know were true. Lucky, this book mainly had facts that we already knew put in fun new ways.