Alexandra Petri's US History
Important American Documents (I Made Up)
by Alexandra Petri
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Pub Date Apr 11 2023 | Archive Date Mar 31 2023
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Description
If you’re going to lie about the past, you might as well make up lies that are fun!
Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri is perhaps America’s most beloved political satirist. Her new, side-splitting work of historical humor uses imagined documents to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.
From the Spanish conquistadors to the Salem witch trials, from Paul Revere’s ride to the exclamation mark in Oklahoma!, Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History presents a deranged timeline in which John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, Nicola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Petri’s “historical fan fiction” shows why she has been hailed as “genius,”* a “national treasure,”** and “one of the funniest writers alive.”***
*Olivia Nuzzi, Katha Pollitt
**Julia Ioffe, Katy Tur, John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Jamil Smith, and Susan Hennessey
*** Randall Munroe
About the Author: Alexandra Petri is a humorist and columnist for the Washington Post and author of Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, a Thurber Prize finalist. Her satire has also appeared in McSweeney's and the New Yorker's Daily Shouts and Murmurs.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324006435 |
| PRICE | $27.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 356 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Brandon W, Educator
What an amazingly funny, nerdy, historical book (in that order). I am always suspicious of how someone can legitimately turn history into a gut-buster but Petri provides the example that others should follow. If you're not at least giving an outloud chuckle to the Adams' long distance sexting, then I surely don't expect your to find humor in the Sesame Street version of D-Day.
I'd love to give some of the tamer ones to my students and see just how befuddled they get by them, for my own schadenfreude-ish motives.
My only suggestion would be to include some more recent history, but I understand the closer you get to contemporary times, the more likely you're going to be pissing someone off. The potential humor of George W. Bush, Trump, and Howard Dean would be worth it, though
I can say I always am aware of how great I consider a book by how I would imagine a sequel or follow-up. In this case, I hope there is a second semester.
If I'm scoring this according to College Bored (no typo there) rubrics, this gets a 5. Petri dominated the Long Essay Question.
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