Book Review: What If? 2 edited by Robert Cowley

What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The path untrodden, counterfactual reality, or simply alternate history. Twenty-five of the 20th Century’s eminent historians look at what might have been in the essay anthology What If? 2 edited by contributor Robert Cowley.

The twenty-five essays range from 424 B.C. in Ancient Greece to the 1948 Elections in the United States covering a variety of topics though for roughly 300 of the 430 pages covered the time between 1912 and 1948. Unlike the previous volume, many of the essays focused on the actual event than going into an alternative scenario or would briefly speculate about things happening differently in the last two paragraphs. The essays that focused on the assignment that were good were Thomas K. Rabb’s essay on Charles I dying in 1641 of the plague and adverting the English Civil War, Alistair Horne’s fanciful piece on Napoleon III not taking Otto von Bismark’s bait to advert the Franco-Prussian war, George Feifer’s essay on Lenin on influencing the Russian Revolution, and Richard B. Frank’s essay on if the United States hadn’t dropped the atomic bombs.

What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been is an interesting set of essays, a lot are knowledgeable for someone who doesn’t know specific points talked about however the “alternate” aspect was lacking compared to the previous collection.

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