Brooks on Books: "Not So: Popular Myths About America From Columbus to Clinton" (1995)

I was wary of this book, as I am of all history books that purport to set us straight on what "really happened" and why we've been bamboozled by teachers, the mainstream media, and the liberal-historical establishment or whatever. Sure, I'm interested in exploring bogus myths and false conventions, but I don't want to read a few hundred pages of some conservative using the platform to tell me how wicked liberals are.

Fortunately, "Not So" is...not so. One could take entries here and there and argue an agenda towards or against politically-correct thinking, but I didn't find one slant to the book as a whole. In fact, I believe he takes on sacred cows of both the left and the right. This was written during the Clinton years, mind you, and Boller actually kind of defends the former First Couple.

More importantly, he emphasizes debunking the original story and explaining the truth, as opposed to ranting about why the original story has taken hold. His list of myths includes both matters of trivia and matters of more intellectual debate. It's a light read with 40-some short chapters, each on a single topic. Boller talks about whether America "lost" China to the Communists, but he also discusses the love lives of figures like Lincoln, James Buchanan, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Boller doesn't write like an academic, either. Sometimes he's quite the opposite, as when he writes about Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.:
In January 1989, when the two men parted after Bush's inaugural ceremony, they exchanged brisk military salutes that looked awesome on television.

The book doesn't go into depth, but it's not designed to. It stimulates some thought, disproves a bunch of myths, and will likely provoke interested readers to get more info. However, I'm not sure that, even in 1995, all these beliefs were as commonly held as Boller indicates. Do a lot of people really think FDR knew Japan was gonna bomb Pearl Harbor? Is the legend of Washington's false teeth still famous for anything besides being a falsehood?

Embarrassingly, at least for present-day readers, Boller is probably wrong on at least one "myth." He asserts that Thomas Jefferson did not father a child with slave Sally Hemings, and his scholarship is a little weak in that chapter even if you don't know that it's generally accepted now that he or one of his close relatives did. At the very least, there's enough evidence to make Boller's matter-of-fact tone on this look dated at best and agenda-driven at worst. It makes you wonder what else in the book is wrong, and a book that is so assertive about righting wrongs and changing misconceptions doesn't need that kind of baggage.

So I would approach this as a light read for someone interested enough in history to enjoy exploring the myths, but maybe not a rewarding experience for someone well versed enough to know this stuff already.