Amazon UK Review - Nonsense
Amazon UK
03/21/2007
This book is, as the synopsis says, "essential reading for true-blue Americans and others oppressed by the English throughout history." But it is not for anyone who wants an accurate appraisal of the British Empire. Despite the fact that the English can't be blamed for or take credit for, everything the British Empire was responsible for (it was the British Empire), many of the examples of England's "Evil Empire" are plainly wrong.
The Spanish used concentration camps in 1898 in the Spanish-American war before the British did in the Second Boer War, the Metric System was French, the modern machine gun an American invention (the Gatling and Maxim guns), and somehow slums and child labour were invented by the English. Moreover, such sweeping statements as the English slaughtered Africans with machine guns, and England benefitted from slavery and supported the Confederacy (although they switched support to the Union) seems to imply that we're a people of mass murdering racists. He neglects to mention that although the English did benefit from slavery (they weren't the only ones) they did more than any other nation to eradicate it.
Then this isn't supposed to be at all accurate. It suffers from being a response to the English appartently blaming all life's ills on the Americans. This is history akin to Gallipoli, Braveheart and The Patriot.
By The man who would be king (UK)
