Book Review: Three Blind Mice by Darryl Murphy
If you enjoy reading about history in language liberally spiced with profanity and crude humor, then you'll love Darryl Murphy's 2014 book Three Blind Mice: The Three Presidents Before Lincoln and the Decade of the 1850s. But since I don't, I'm not part of the target audience for this f-bomb laced treatise that reads like a drunken sailor's stream of consciousness. I should have clued in when the f-word was the most frequently used adjective in the "about the author" section, but there's no hint of this on the book's front or back cover.
The language isn't the main problem with the book however. First of all, the book really isn't about what it's title suggests. Very little of the book is about the "three blind mice" of the title (Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan). Their biographies are pretty much concluded in the first 35 pages of the book's 192 pages. The book meanders off into a range of topics and tangents that include 19th century European politics, art and literature, religion and industrialization. Often the author strays onto topics outside of the decade of the 1850s, though for the most part, the author keeps to that era. On each of these subjects the author offers strongly held opinions presented in the form of conclusions, without much in the way of analysis. Historical figures are good or bad, wrong or right, simply because the author says they are.
But it is primarily the author's language (both its profanity and its lack of respect for the intelligence of its audience) make this book very painful to read. For example, many of the female historic figures referred to in the book are introduced by some sort of crude sexual reference. One female royal is described by the c-word. Any gay or lesbian characters are firstly described by whatever the author imagines their favorite sexual practice to be. It is juvenile and distracts from the telling of some great history that is colorful enough by itself, without the author's immature, barroom story-telling style.
It is disappointing that such a potentially interesting subject is handled in so poorly. The author was clearly capable of doing much better. For example, his analysis of treatment of Native Americans is insightful, and the book's epilogue has the potential for encapsulating the era very well. But for anyone genuinely wanting to learn about these three presidents and how their administrations contributed to the civil war, reading this book is a waste of time. (A much better analysis of the presidents preceding Lincoln can be found in Chris DeRose's 2014 book The Presidents' War - Six American Presidents and the Civil War That Divided Them, reviewed earlier in this community here).
The language isn't the main problem with the book however. First of all, the book really isn't about what it's title suggests. Very little of the book is about the "three blind mice" of the title (Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan). Their biographies are pretty much concluded in the first 35 pages of the book's 192 pages. The book meanders off into a range of topics and tangents that include 19th century European politics, art and literature, religion and industrialization. Often the author strays onto topics outside of the decade of the 1850s, though for the most part, the author keeps to that era. On each of these subjects the author offers strongly held opinions presented in the form of conclusions, without much in the way of analysis. Historical figures are good or bad, wrong or right, simply because the author says they are.
But it is primarily the author's language (both its profanity and its lack of respect for the intelligence of its audience) make this book very painful to read. For example, many of the female historic figures referred to in the book are introduced by some sort of crude sexual reference. One female royal is described by the c-word. Any gay or lesbian characters are firstly described by whatever the author imagines their favorite sexual practice to be. It is juvenile and distracts from the telling of some great history that is colorful enough by itself, without the author's immature, barroom story-telling style.
It is disappointing that such a potentially interesting subject is handled in so poorly. The author was clearly capable of doing much better. For example, his analysis of treatment of Native Americans is insightful, and the book's epilogue has the potential for encapsulating the era very well. But for anyone genuinely wanting to learn about these three presidents and how their administrations contributed to the civil war, reading this book is a waste of time. (A much better analysis of the presidents preceding Lincoln can be found in Chris DeRose's 2014 book The Presidents' War - Six American Presidents and the Civil War That Divided Them, reviewed earlier in this community here).