Curious Scotland
Tales From A Hidden History
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
The histories of nations are never as simple as their legends suggest. George Rosie has been driven by a powerful curiosity about the country he has lived in since he was an Edinburgh schoolboy fifty years ago. This lively mindset has established him as one of Scotland's most inquiring writers and journalists, in print and on television. In Curious Scotland, he unearths and illuminates many neglected aspects of Scottish history in a rich collection of episodes that ranges from the Picts to the Indian tribes of North America. What became of the sons of Robert Burns? How did Scotland influence the Ku Klux Klan? Why was a Hebridean island deliberately infested with anthrax? The answers lie in a book which reveals the complexity, contradictions and sheer fascination of Scotland's long and strange story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fun book makes no claim to scholarly rigor, but is instead "an autodidact's anthology of neglected episodes in Scottish history." The stories were chosen, Rosie says, according to just one principle: "Really? How interesting! I never knew." And so Rosie, a Scottish journalist, playwright and television documentary maker, takes us on a diverting tour, down the short cuts, bypasses and cul-de-sacs of history rather than its highways, from the time of King Arthur to the present. A flavor of what Rosie offers is hinted at in his chapter titles, which include "The Glasgow Frankenstein" (about an 1818 medical experiment to resurrect a hanged man); "The Blasphemer" (about Thomas Aikenhead, the last man to be executed in Scotland, in 1697, for that crime); and "Operation Vegetarian" (Britain's wartime plan to poison German cattle with anthrax). Rosie even makes a few stops in America, where he tracks down John Ross, the Highland Scot and Cherokee who became "the Native American statesman of the early nineteenth century" and dealt with every president from James Madison in 1816 to Andrew Johnson half a century later. There is much that readers "never knew" about and will be glad to have been told. 11 b&w illus., map.
