ODD LISTS SPICE UP HISTORY
Popes, presidents and other powerful people are surrounded by the finest trappings as they make important decisions that affect our lives. So we tend to think they live in a world much different than ours--more holy, more pristine, more worthy.
After all, no one is going to write a book about you or me. However, Karl Shaw’s book, "5 People Who Died During Sex: and 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists," lets you peek into the lives of the world’s greatest rulers, inventors and artists. Their bizarre behavior might make you and your dysfunctional family seem almost normal.
Shaw is a journalist-turned-freelance author who has written other books on history. This book contains dozens of lists, from "12 Celebrity Celibates" to "History’s 10 Least Appealing Dinner Dates." Here are some of my own lists, gleaned from Shaw’s book.
5 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT HITLER
> Who knows what made him tick, but we do learn that Hitler (like Napoleon and Mussolini) was afraid of cats.
> Hitler became a vegetarian in 1931 when his doctors put him on a meatless diet to cure him of flatulence and a chronic stomach disorder.
> He once tried to cure his chronic flatulence by drinking machine-gun oil
> The fuhrer suffered impaired virility, so his physician injected him with a compound containing hormones from crushed animal genitalia.
> His trusted commander, Erwin Rommel, decided on the eve of D-Day that it was so quiet he might as well go home and celebrate his wife’s birthday. As the allies closed in on his bunker, Hitler married Eva Braun, and the next day they celebrated the honeymoon by swallowing poison. That's the beginning of the end for the Nazis, Hitler's romance, and his flatulence.
4 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT THE CHURCH
> Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) had 10 illegitimate children.
> Pope John XII was bludgeoned to death in 964 with a hammer by an irate husband who caught His Holiness in bed with his wife.
> In 1100, the Dominican Church advised women to spit three times into the mouth of a frog, or to eat bees, immediately after intercourse to prevent conception.
> Some of the causes of the Black Death, according to the Church, included Jews poisoning the wells, going to the theater and olive oil.
3 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL SEX
> JFK enlisted staff to help organize nude swimming parties in the presidential pool.
> Lydon B. Johnson was aggrieved that JFK’s reputation as a stud was greater than his and reportedly complained to friends, "I’ve had more women by accident than he’s had on purpose."
> Grover Cleveland ignored his staff’s advice and admitted to fathering an illegitimate son. His enemies circulated a leaflet accusing him of bestiality and wife-beating, but he was re-elected with a healthy majority.
This book isn’t going to give you the perspective of a typical biography. You are not, for example, going to learn how a young Albert Einstein, who was slow to speak, became the great genius of the 20th Century.
However, this catalog of factoids may change your perspective on people of power.
Some seem more human, others are less deserving of that description. It shows that wearing a crown, or getting one’s name in a history book, is no true measure of greatness.