How They Choked: Failures, Flops, and Flaws of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- How They Choked: Failures, Flops, and Flaws of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg
A scan though the table of contents in this followup to Bragg’s How They Croaked (BCCB 3/11) yields names that don’t initially seem to fit together—Montezuma II and Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony and J. Bruce Ismay—but here the author brings some clever outside-the-box thinking to bear on the many ways in which high profile careers go up in smoke, or the occasions where big names never saw the fruits of their work. Bragg mainly looks for character flaws of Shakespearean proportion to explain individual failures: Montezuma couldn’t get past blood-soaked ritual to understand the true threat of European invaders; Thomas Edison’s ego put him on the losing side of the AC/DC current wars; Isabella of Castile ignored the humane tenets of her religion in favor of bigoted zealotry; Vincent Van Gogh was just plain loony. This breezy exercise in armchair psychology may actually unearth some nuggets of insight, but often Bragg shortchanges historical context for glib riposte and judges the behaviors of other centuries and cultures by our contemporary standards. There’s no question, though, that she gets off some good lines and dredges up some relevant material that more hagiographic treatments often miss (e.g., Edison’s experiments with death by electrocution, aimed at smearing the reputation of his rival). Combined with O’Malley’s over-the-top caricatures and humorous spot art, this joins its predecessor Croaked as an inviting tour of history’s wild side. A bibliography, index, and suggestions for further reading are included.
