ALEXANDRA PETRI'S US HISTORY

Washington Post humor writer Petri attempts a funny spin on history.

The author opens by channeling the previous occupant of the White House, proclaiming that since history is written by the winners, she, though “not a historian, or a scholar” is now “something much more important: a winner.” She continues with a series of imagined, counterfactual episodes—e.g., an Indigenous person objecting to the terms of the so-called Columbian exchange, displeased about providing potatoes on one hand in exchange for disease on the other (“Typhus took generations to perfect,” the European says); or a New Yorker who misreads the words Erie Canal as an instigation for a more vigorous horror literature of the sort that Edgar Allan Poe will soon be cranking out. Some of the pieces work: Petri does a nice job mangling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby by inserting Hemingway-esque declarations into its famous closing, and she effectively dumbs down Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which probably didn’t need the simplification, to have Guy Montag explain that what makes a book dangerous is the ideas it contains (“It’s, like, a metaphor”). Also entertaining: an exchange in which Frank Lloyd Wright defends his leaky, short roofs by explaining that they’re keyed to his height, which is “the perfect height for a human being”; and Rodgers and Hammerstein arguing over whether, having put an exclamation point on Oklahoma! their other works might benefit from the same treatment (re: South Pacific, “It’s a geographical location. It doesn’t need pizzazz”). Petri’s disquisitions on the shooting of John Lennon, a drugless Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the U.S. presidents in Ragnarok are duds. Much of the book, studded with fun moments, lacks the sustained wit and goofiness of the British humor classic 1066 and All That.

A sporadically humorous take on the American past, which is all too seldom a laughing matter.