Note: This article is a raw riff. I read, I riff, I publish. It will likely have grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and various positions are not wholly fleshed out. This riff is for my book club, the first half is for everyone, the second half is for the paying members.
Does a mistake in a history negate the entire work? Should you stop reading the book? Should you wonder if you wasted your time or wonder if you need to look up the facts to erase the faults?
I spotted a big mistake in A Patriot’s History of the United States. I came upon a World War II passage that raised a question mark. I’m not a WWII expert, but I have a good enough understanding having read a number of books on it, most recently The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson and The War of the World by Niall Ferguson. And I’ve dabbled into some military history. In college, I did study some of World War II, and got a firsthand look at Nazi sources. I read Mein Kampf, and in my study abroad my freshman year, vi…