Alexandra Petri’s US History

by Alexandra Petri

Dear Bitches:

It is my sad duty to inform you that I cannot review Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up), a collection of humorous pieces that make brutal and glorious fun of all the stuff that we learned in high school. I want to review it, but I can’t. I can’t because I can’t breathe, and I can’t breathe because the chapter “How to Pose For Your Civil War Photograph” has me in stitches. I can’t see, because tears of mirth are streaming down my face. I can’t use my fingers, because I am turning pages with them so as to read “The Waste Cat and Other Suppressed T.S. Eliot Poems” all the quicker. It’s a problem.

I can’t even use my computer, because I have been kicked out of my home, and that is because I will not stop interrupting my family at whatever they are doing to read aloud to them. They can be on the phone, watching TV, deep in slumber – I do not care, I must get their attention and read “Moby-Dick: An Oral History” out loud to them, which is especially annoying to them because as I read, I laugh so hard that I cannot talk, especially when Moby Dick says “I can barely keep track of how many guys blame me for their lost legs” and when Starbuck says “It was a terrible voyage. The good news is that my legacy is so scant, I will never see my name or likeness used to advertise a mediocre product.”

It seems that even my loving husband does not wish to be awakened at midnight by the sound of me snort-guffawing my way through “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Draft Where Hunter S. Thompson Forgot to Bring Any Drugs.” You marry someone, you think you know them, and then after 24 years of marriage they say that they just want to go to sleep instead of reading “Giovanni’s Escape Room.” Go figure.

I was going to tell you that if you are a fan of history, politics, or literature then you should of course read this collection of humorous essays, a collection that begins with “Dear King Charles, I Have No Doubts About This Golden City and I Will Write You As Soon As I Am Back From It Bearing Gold” and ends with “Ragnarok in the Hall of Presidents.” I was going to inform you that if you are the kind of person who knows what the Teapot Dome Scandal is then this is the book for you (be sure to read “Teapot Dome Excuses”), but all this giggling is giving me a mild asthma flare up. And regrettably I cannot tell you to be sure to enjoy “The Yellow Wallpaper Guy Tries to Get a Refund” because from this position, rolling around on the floor as I am, it’s just very difficult to write anything down. I’m sure you all understand.

In closing, please forgive me for not reviewing Alexandra Petri’s US History. I wanted to, I really did, and I would have told you it is very funny, but just now I did a spit take while reading “In Cold Blood If Truman Capote Didn’t Think the Murderer Guy Was Kind of Hot” and I got coffee everywhere and I have to clean it up. I hope you will not feel too badly about my lack of a review and that in lieu of reading a review you will read this book instead.

– Carrie S

A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri’s US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed!

As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn’t learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we’re going to fail! Maybe it’s time for a new textbook.

Alexandra Petri’s US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri’s “historical fan fiction” draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.

On Petri’s deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Ayn Rand rewrites The Little Engine That Could. Nikola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain—who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated—offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie.

This side-splitting work of historical humor shows why Alexandra Petri has been hailed as a “genius,”* a “national treasure,”† and “one of the funniest writers alive”‡.

*Olivia Nuzzi, Katha Pollitt

†Julia Ioffe, Katy Tur, John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Jamil Smith, and Susan Hennessey

‡Randall Munroe

Historical: American, Humor, Nonfiction