I wonder if we can submit this book to I Don’t Even Own A Television.
I know they normally only do fictional books but based on Mason’s knowledge of history this comes close enough.
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“Don Carlos: The Worlds Unluckiest Man” - no apostrophe in the chapter title
“left-handed” with a hyphen and “right handed” without a hyphen occur in the same sentence.
Andreas Vesalius has his name spelled “Vesalias”.
The part with Don John of Austria is a mess. Don Carlos, who did not become Emperor Charles V, attended university with Don John, the illegitimate son of Charles V, half-brother of Philip II, and uncle of Don Carlos. The last relation is mentioned without explaining the rest.
The chapter on Squanto credits an article by Eric Metaxas. It points to his personal website, which says that the article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal. Metaxas is a conservative radio host and author. He has written popular biographies of religious figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther that appear to be received poorly by actual historians. He has also written the children’s books Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp.
More annoying inconsistencies within the same sentence: “Benedict, Md.” with a comma and abbreviated state name and “Bladensburg Maryland” without a comma.
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Holy shit I’m so glad I just found this thread. NBZ I admire your patience. Please keep going.
The inconsistency is the stuff that just kills me. It literally does not matter in any way how you abbreviate states. Just do it the same way. So tilting.
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I could get how a book with multiple authors could be inconsistent from chapter to chapter, if they were writing chapters separately with their own voice. It’s just ridiculous how there are inconsistencies within a single sentence.
When I’m done reading this book, I might just channel my spite into writing a book of my own.
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You should! According to that dude with all the question marks on his suit, the gubmint will even pay you to do it!
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Necro-pedantry: I used to hate that, but coming to believe that it’s a corruption of ‘were to have’ sort of makes it more tolerable? Like I used to find ‘catch pregnant’ weirdly disturbing; now I think it’s likely back-formed from a corruption of ‘got pregnant’ to ‘cot/caught pregnant’ and it’s like, that just sort of happens.
Maybe, but fell/fall pregnant is also a thing so I’m not sure its not an archaic usage where the idiom stuck around after the meaning of the component words drifted. Besides, you still catch a cold.
Fans send them books all the time, sometimes they use those books for the show. email Jay for an address. idk if this would really be in their wheelhouse bc they aren’t familiar with MM. You would need to send two copies of it.
Not sure whether you guys are serious, but it just seems like Mason does use the second conditional correctly.
„If they had understood…“
That’s my point though - pregnancy’s not a disease. Doing some googling, I can’t find anything on the phrase itself. Etymonline offers a sense related to sleep that maybe kind of works if you squint a bit.
I mean that ‘would have’ as conditional is at least somewhat current in American vernacular, and I don’t think it’s an error, I think it’s a corruption of the past subjunctive:
“If they were to have understood…”
Compare German würde for example, it doesn’t translate in all senses but is morphologically similar enough to cause confusion, perhaps among first- or second-generation German-American immigrants. So maybe the call’s coming from inside the house 
MM’s book currently ranks #148,470 on Amazon’s bestseller list, so the bar is pretty high.
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As someone who’s in the process of writing a book and gets extremely frustrated when my writing comes out in stilted, passive, run-on sentences - I’m scared even reading some of the passages is going to rub off on me. Like watching Charles Barlkley’s golf swing.
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I feel like this is nitting up the thread a little too much, but being somewhat common in spoken American English does not make it standard usage in publication and it seems rare enough in written form for me to notice it here, but obviously you guys read more English publications than I do.
German “würde” is actually a very good comparison, as it is ungrammatical in that context. The correct German form is “wäre”. “Würde” is the conditional form of the future tense, but almost nobody uses “wäre” in spoken language and so “würde” is sort of the colloquial conditional auxiliary verb.
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“Had they understood…” is better.
Signed,
-A guy born and raised in Alabama
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Oh I’m not saying it is, just that maybe a possible explanation might make it bug you less.
The chapter on Antietam gives credit to an article on history.com.
That article correctly spells “Sergeant”. Mason does not.
I don’t think I have pointed this out yet, but this book likes to capitalize certain leading articles, such as in “The Battle of Antietam”.
The Chickamauga chapter quotes Wikipedia: “in a brilliant, almost bloodless, campaign of maneuver”. I strongly suspect this line was lifted without quotation marks from Shelby Foote, ironic because of Foote’s disdain for footnotes.
There’s a bunch of white space at the bottom of page 105 for no particular reason.
This chapter also has multiple missing closing quotation marks.
“Picket’s Charge” is correctly spelled in a footnote, but not in the main body of the text.
The chapter on Midway credits videos by Montemayor and Invicta, two popular Youtube history channels.
Mason seems completely ignorant of the convention to italicize ship names.
The Jackson-Dickinson duel chapter cites a history.com article.
The chapter fails to mention the angle-shooting in this duel. Jackson’s second immediately said “fire” in an attempt to get Dickinson to hurry his shot.
Mason suggests that, having missed, Dickinson could have run off instead of following the rules and standing while Jackson took his shot. Perhaps Mason understands neither dueling nor honor.
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Shats
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I’ll leave this here–somewhat topical due to MM shouting out Churchill and I’ll take some pride in getting him a bit flustered. I didn’t get a Best Wishes!
eta: my third point is concededly a bit dickish, I think I was pretty mad about Trump at the time and Mason seemed like a fair target.
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And then this one time, at census camp…
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