This is a Reader's Digest publication with several editors at Gardner Associates contributing, and while it went off the rails on occasion with too much speculative material, some of which was purely fictional, overall it presented a wealth of interesting historical oddities and mysteries. For any writer looking for inspiration for a novel, or even a non-fiction work for that matter, there's a cornucopia of ideas here to whet the imagination.
The book is divided into seven sections, some of which have titles that can be taken with a bit of a grain of salt. I won't go into every item in each section, but I shall list some from each to give a general idea of what's in there:
- They Vanished Without a Trace This consists of missing explorers, missing children in the Tower of London, missing Nazi gold, the search for El Dorado and Virginia's so-called lost colony among others.
- Deaths Under Dubious Circumstances This covers European monarchs, African rebel leaders, Shakespeare's rival, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Russian royal family, Descartes, Mozart and Napoleon.
- Strange and Enigmatic Characters Lawrence of Arabia, Rasputin, Lord Byron, Nostradamus, Heinrich Schliemann, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Scott, and Rudolf Hess.
- Guilty or Not Guilty Watergate, Mata Hari, Edgar Allen Poe, the Rosenbergs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Bruno Hauptmann.
- Half Truth, Half Legend King Arthur, Dracula, Robin Hood, Faust, William Tell, Robinson Crusoe.
- Unanswered Questions Kaspar Hauser, Pearl Harbor, Shakespeare, the man in the (iron) mask, the sinking of the Lusitania.
- Fateful Blunders The Spanish armada, the London blitz, the Titanic, Waterloo, Custer, Mussolini.
So: a wide variety of topics, set throughout history, some of which are not as mysterious as this book would like us to believe, but nonetheless interesting stories. I commend this as a worthy read for anyone looking for an interesting read, light entertainment, or story ideas. The chapters on each topic are only three or four pages long, so it makes for a nice convenient read, or a decent bathroom book.
