That’s not in my American History Book by Thomas Ayres

This is a nice little trivia book for the history buff. It also makes decent bathroom reading. The bathroom reading part isn’t meant to be an insult, to me it’s a compliment and it accurately describes the book’s style: short chapters of two to five pages which can read be in a “sitting” or several chapters if necessary. Ayres’ background states he used to be a reporter so that also explains the book’s emphasis on brevity. 
 
Is it actually interesting though? Yes. When the author is mythbusting about Betsy Ross, George Washington or Wyatt Earp, the book is at its best. The other type of accounts Ayres covers are more in the “did you know?” vein: Communist settlements in pre-Civil War Texas (more like a Commune or planned Community, not a mini Soviet state), Lindbergh was only the first person to fly over the Atlantic alone (he was technically the 82nd person to make the trip) and a string of presidential nicknames up to Clinton. Some of his writing smacks of PC with his usage of “African American” for Black but overall he’s not some apologist as Conservatives accuse writers of being whenrevising History. I beg to differ on his account of Jonas Salk being a maverick, many of those who helped him develop the cure called him a glory hog.
 
I feel that a book like this should be thrown in with high school US History classes to shake up those rather awful and inaccurate textbooks. Just have it organized in chronological order instead of scattered by subject matter as Ayres did.