I sometimes wonder if there is some kind of conspiracy surrounding the subject of History. By definition, everything that has ever happened is a part of history, thousands of years of epic wars, awe-inspiring victories, hilarious defeats and heart warming romances are in there. And yet at school they manage to bore us into submission by having our heads filled with dates and quotes from the textbook by teachers that always smell of old meat.
It takes a true visionary, a true master of the craft to write a book that breaks that and exposes history for the wondrous thing it truly is.
That book is Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live by Ben Thompson, author of www.badassoftheweek.com. Notice a theme there?
Like the website, the book covers a different historical figure in each chapter, from Ghenghis Khan to Jack Churchill, recounting their extraordinary achievements with the kind of enthusiasm and tone more typically associated with a drunk frat boy describing a Michael Bay film than a historian teaching you.
For instance, the chapter on Tomoe Gozen, one of Japans only female Samurai begins with this:
‘Saying that the women’s liberation movement hadn’t really caught on in Feudal Japan would be kind of like saying that having all of your pubic hair removed with salad tongs would be mildly uncomfortable.’
Despite the title saying otherwise, the book follows more than just warriors and soldiers who delivered inordinate amounts of violence to the world, there are chapters for the likes of Nikola Tesla, the real inventor of the light bulb or anything else Thomas Edison says he invented (he just happened to be working at the patent office Tesla applied to… make of that what you will.) or Liu Ji, the Chinese Peasant who rose up to become Emperor and bring about a golden age for China. Thompson recounts their lives with the same enthusiasm and rich, barely censored language as everyone else.
And yet his facts are there, the book has a bibliography ten pages long and in smaller print! This book would actually pass muster as a school textbook. By teaching you most of the facts required to pass your GCSE’s while managing to entertain you every step of the way.
If there’s anything to criticise the book for, it’s that you cannot really read this in one sitting. After a while, people killing a lot of other people with nothing but a toothpick starts to lose its sense of wonder when you’ve just heard about ten other people doing the same thing. But this just means the book has to be taken a few chapters at a time every day rather than sit down and read it cover to cover as you’ll inevitably be tempted to try.
The other problem this book has is that Thompson’s sensational style can lead to confusion some times when he makes a joke that is supposed to be over the top and you start to wonder whether you’re supposed to believe it. You’ve read 
about a bear that assisted Polish soldiers in the war effort at Monte Casino, a man that piled the severed hands and penises of his enemies in conquered villages and a Russian King who was fascinated by Midgets, so why should you have any reason not to believe that Admiral Nelson high fived a guy so hard his hand came off, or that someone could physically swing a ships cannon like a club? Nine times out of ten you can tell it’s a joke, but by the end of the book there will be almost nothing that can surprise you.
The only question worth asking about the book is not ‘Should I read this book?’ but ‘How can I be more like the people in this book what I’ve just bought and read?’ or ‘Why was I not given this book while I was at school?’
If you’re into your history or if you’re just into violence, this book is well worth a read.
