If you’re looking for the perfect holiday gift for that cousin who dropped out two credits shy of her BA in European Civ — or for that pesky uncle who won’t stop suggesting another game of Trivial Pursuit — you could do far worse than The Mental Floss History of the World (go here for a review). Recently, the book’s co-author, Eric Sass, and mental_floss magazine co-founder/”El Presidente” Will Pearson spoke with Popdose about their latest project.
Popdose: Mental Floss has turned many thousands of readers into experts on a variety of historical and current-affairs minutiae – but a one-volume history of the world? Was there any point at which you were concerned you had bitten off more than you could chew?
Will Pearson: I don’t think we were ever concerned that we’d bitten off more than we could chew, but we did want to take our time and get it right. Most of our book projects take about a year to complete. We worked on this one for three.
Eric Sass: It was definitely a lot of work, but it was fun. Ironically, it ended up taking more time to make the book short enough to be published in a single volume; it ended up being all about cutting down, rather than adding on. Above all, I knew we would finish it because we had signed a contract, and Will knows where I live.
In rummaging through historical epochs and events mostly ignored in the West – the wars of ancient Greece, for example, or the Chinese dynasties – were there any swaths of subject matter that made even you think, “Man, there’s a good reason we don’t bother to talk about this stuff in high school?”
ES: When you’re writing about history there’s always a danger of it becoming “just one damn thing after another,” but I hope we avoided that. The content is short and varied, and we tried to bring out the weird or amusing sides of subjects that might otherwise be boring. And we weren’t afraid to skip stuff when it was too egregiously monotonous, giving a broad summary at most. For example, regarding the Peloponnesian War: “The whole thing is too long and tedious to describe here, but the short version goes like this…” (more…)
